The Journal o / American Drama and Theatre welcomes submissions. The aim is to promote research on theatre of the Americas. Manuscripts should be prepared in conformity with the Chicago Manual of Style.
The Journal o / American Drama and Theatre welcomes submissions. The aim is to promote research on theatre of the Americas. Manuscripts should be prepared in conformity with the Chicago Manual of Style.
The Journal o / American Drama and Theatre welcomes submissions. The aim is to promote research on theatre of the Americas. Manuscripts should be prepared in conformity with the Chicago Manual of Style.
Volume 22, Number 1 Winter 2010 Founding Editors: Vera Mowry Roberts and Walter Meserve Editor: David Savran Managing Editor: Naomi Stubbs Editorial Assistant: Rayya El Zein Circulation Manager: Tori Amoscato Circulation Assistant: Ana Martinez Martin E. Segal Theatre Center Frank Hentschker, Executive Director Professor Edwin Wilson, Chairman, Advisory Board Professor Daniel Gerould, Director of Publications Jan Stenzel, Director of Administration THE GRADUATE SCHOOL AND UNIVERSITY CENTER OF THE CITY UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK EDITORIAL BoARD Philip Auslander Una Chaudhuri William Demastes Harry Elam Jorge Huerta Stacy Wolf Shannon Jackson Jonathan Kalb Jill Lane Thomas Postlewait Robert Vorlicky The Journal o/ American Drama and Theatre welcomes submissions. Our aim is to promote research on theatre of the Americas and to encourage historical and theoretical approaches to plays, playwrights, performances, and popular theatre traditions. Manuscripts should be prepared in conformity with The Chicago Manual of Style, using footnotes (rather than endnotes). We request that articles be submitted as e-mail attachments, using Microsoft Word format. Please note that all correspondence will be conducted by e-mail, and please allow three to four months for a decision. Our distinguished Editorial Board will constitute the jury of selection. Our e-mail address is jadt@gc.cuny.cdu. You may also address editorial inquiries to the Editors, JADT /Martin E. Segal Theatre Center, CUNY Graduate Center, 365 Fifth Avenue, New York, New York 10016-4309. Please visit our web site at web.gc.cuny.edu/mestc. The Journal o/ American Drama and Theatre is supported by generous grants from the Vera Mowry Roberts Chair in American Theatre and the Sidney E. Cohn Chair m Theatre Studies at the City University of New York. Martin E . Segal Theatre Center Copyright 2010 The Journal o/ American Drama and Theatre (ISSN 1044-937X) is a member of CELJ and is published three times a year, in the Winter, Spring, and Fall. Subscriptions are $20.00 for each calendar year. Foreign subscriptions require an additional $10.00 for postage. Inquire of Circulation Manager/Martin E. Segal Theatre Center, CUNY Graduate Center, 365 Fifth Avenue, New York, New York 10016-4309. All journals are available from ProQuest Information and Learning as abstracts online via ProQuest information service and the International Index to the Performing Arts. All journals are indexed in the MLA International Bibliography and are members of the Council of Editors of Learned Journals. THE JOURNAL OF AMERICAN DRAMA AND THEATRE Volume 22, Number 1 Winter 2010 CONTENTS FROM THE EDITOR j oHN H. MusE Eons in an Instant: The Paradoxes of Suzan-Lori Parks's 365 Dqys/ 365 Plqys ASHIS SENGUPTA "Corning Out of the Closet": Re-reading The Bqys in the Band and On a Muggy Night in Mumbai DOUGLAS A. jONES, JR. Aesthetics, Ideology, and the use of the Victim in Early American Melodrama KATE DossETT Commemorating Haiti on the Harlem Stage CONTRIBUTORS 5 7 33 51 83 121 Vera Mowry Roberts 1913-2010 A pioneer in American theatre studies and champion of women artists and scholars, Vera Mowry Roberts died in Texas on 1 February 2010. She was a master teacher who trained two generations of theatre scholars and worked tirelessly to legitimate U.S. theatre as an object of academic study. Believing in the inextricable connection between theory and practice, Vera was educated at the University of Pittsburgh and later directed in educational, community, and professional theatres while teaching theatre history and dramatic literature. In 1950 she and five others co-founded Washington's Arena Stage, one of the first and most influential regional theatres in the United States. Vera joined what was then called the Department of Speech and Dramatic Arts at Hunter College of the City University of New York in 1955 where she taught for fifty years. In 1968, she was one of the facul- ty members who established the PhD Program in Theatre at CUNY's Graduate Center. Her publications include dozens of articles and three books: On Stage, A History of the Theatre (1962), The Nature of Theatre (1972), and Notable Women in American Theatre (1989), which she co- authored with Milly S. Baranger and Alice M. Robinson. When Vera began her career after World War II, American drama was widely regarded as inferior to the European canon and hard- ly worth taking seriously as a subject of scholarship. Along with many others, she had to fight to establish its legitimacy during a period when playwrights like Tennessee Williams and Arthur Miller, directors like Elia Kazan and Jose Quintero, and a new generation of actors trained by the Actors Studio were revolutionizing American theatre practice. By later founding and editing the Journal of American Drama and Theatre, she became instrumental in advancing the study of the theatre to which she was so passionately dedicated. Many things stand out in Vera's scholarship: her rigorous atten- tion to history, her reluctance to accept critical cliches, and her attention to plays and players often ignored by more conventional historians. But above all, I am struck by her passion for live theatre and her belief that it provides the richest way of knowing the world. For Vera, theatre "takes the student into many areas of human knowledge-literature, art, music, politics, economics, philosophy, science, [and] invention." Among all the arts, it is the "most rewarding field of study for those insatiable people who desire to know 'all about everything."' Vera will be missed by her many, many students and colleagues but her work and dedication will continue to inspire new generations of theatre scholars. JOURNAL OF AMERICAN DRAMA Al"i D THE,\TRE 22, NO.1 (WINTER 2010) EONS IN AN INSTANT: THE PARADOXES OF SUZAN-LORI PARKS'S 365 DAYS/365 PLAYS John H. Muse We want the mega and we want the micro, the super- size-me and the sushi- all at the same time. Mark Ravenhillt In contemporary physics the uncharted territories are the quantum and cosmic. In a theatrical milieu that accepts thirty-minute one-act plays and fifteen-hour Ring cycles as standard, artists in search of undiscovered time signatures must explore the extremes. A global popular culture simultaneously saturated by shorts and obsessed with record-breaking feats of endurance has contributed to a fascinating contemporary phe- nomenon in the theatre: the marathon of very short plays. I call these massive compilations of diminutive drama "microthons."2 If the practice of theatrical compilation stretches back to the beginnings of theatre his- tory, recent microthons register a contemporary encyclopedic urge stoked by the pace and promise of the digital, an urge simultaneously to break the world into comprehensible bits and to make everything avail- able at once. Contemporary theatre provides numerous examples of the mass consumption of single-serving drama; from the drastically abridged comprehensiveness of the Reduced Shakespeare Company, to the Nee- Futurists' frantic attempts to present thirty plays in an hour, the digitally- encyclopedic Wikipedia Plays,3 or Mark Ravenhill's recent "Epic Cycle of 1 Mark Ravenhill, introduction to Shoot/ Get Treasure/ Repeat (J..-ondon: Methuen, 2008), 5. 2 I intend the term to designate extreme experiments in theatrical compilation. A two- or three-hour evening of twenty-minute one-act plays is probably not a microthon- not least because such standardized production packages reinforce assump- tions about length rather than challenging them-but the Nco-Futurists's hour-long race to complete thirty original plays in sixty minutes qualifies despite its relative brevity. 3 Ars Nova's The Wikipedia Plqys (2007) comprises seventeen ten-minute plays, each based on the title of a Wikipedia entry. To replicate something of the randomness and linking of an online encyclopedia, Ars Nova used Wikipedia to generate their titles by following embedded links from one topic to another. BroadwayWorld.com, ' Jarrow, 8 MUSE Short Plays," Shoot/Get Treasure/Repeat. But the microthonparexcellence-- and the focus of this article-is Suzan-Lori Parks's marathon of the miniscule: 365 Dqys/ 365 Plqys. Parks's project offers in both its literary and theatrical manifestations a sustained and self-conscious interrogation of the minimal and maximal limits of dramatic form. 365 warrants par- ticular attention not only because it epitomizes many of the tendencies found in other recent microthons, but also because its paradoxes map a newly expansive geography for playwriting and performance. 365 Dqys/ 365 Plqys refers to two distinct microthons: a private compositional journey exploring dramatic form, and a public experiment testing theatrical possibility. Starting on 13 November 2002, Parks chal- lenged herself to write a play a day for a year. She approached the proj- ect with near religious dedication and, a year later, completed a long and heterogeneous collection of very short plays. The cycle remained in Parks's drawer until 2006, when she and producer Bonnie Metzgar devised an ambitious plan to turn her private ritual outward: the 365 Festival. The festival created an international network (365 Global) and sixteen networks within the United States. Each network organized a complete run of the cycle by finding fifty-two theatres or other groups willing to perform a week of plays, however they saw fit. On 13 November 2006, four years after the first play was penned, a yearlong epic of simultaneous theatrical collaboration began. The same day, Parks published the series as a book. 365 exemplifies the microthon impulse on every level: as a per- formance festival that straddled the global and local, as a one-time com- positional challenge that created a potentially endless recurring cycle, as a very long book yoking together hundreds of tiny pieces, as a national epic composed of lapidary parables, and as a home to plays that frustrate des- ignations like long or short by attempting to be both at once. Superlatives cling to the project. Some of the cycle's plays challenge the record for the shortest play ever, but as a whole it is among the longest scripts ever pub- lished. Most of its plays last a few short minutes in performance, yet the 365 Festival built out of them "the largest theatrical collaboration in U.S. history," if not world history.4 365's individual plays contend that a moment or a thought can constitute a play, while the nearly 400-page book argues that a play cycle can retain coherence despite extraordinary Miranda, Etc. Take Part in 'The Wikipedia Plays."' http://www.broadwayworld.com/view column.cfm?colid=20077 (accessed 9 September 2008). 4 Mike Boehm, "Suzan-Lori Parks Offers a Play a Day," Los Angeles Times, 30 June 2006, E-2. EONS IN AN INSTANT 9 length. Like other microthons, 365 reflects and contributes to the widen- ing purview of performance, an idea now so capacious as to include at its minimal bounds almost any utterance or gesture, while offering at its outer limits to account for the preponderance of human (and some non- human) activity. The interplay between compression and expansion has been an animating tension of dramatic activity since its origins. While Parks's performance marathon bears some resemblance to earlier festi- vals-especially medieval cycle drama-and while many of its plays reveal the influence of earlier modernist and avant-garde experimenta- tion, 365 deserves attention for the new and culturally-relevant ways it tests fundamental assumptions about theatrical possibility. Recent critics like Philip Kolin, Rebecca Rugg, and Kathryn Walat have described how Parks's democratic embrace of radical inclu- sion, collaboration, possibility, and flexibility has expanded and leveled the map of American theatre.s In what follows, I acknowledge these same urges while calling attention to opposing forces that generate pro- ductive tensions in the project: exclusion, privacy, limitation, and formal rigor. Taking a centripetal path from the global sweep of 365's megaper- formance to the narrow confines of its microplays, I argue that a series of paradoxes in scale animate the project and frustrate (rather than oblit- erate) traditional distinctions. The 365 Festival is a media-enabled mass production comprising unique and local performance events; the project is both closet drama and uncloseted festival; it is a democratic epic whose embrace of radical inclusion reveals the limitations of radical inclusion; its time signatures are both linear and cyclical, both brief and infinite; and finally, its plays test the minimal requirements for dramatic form, but their very minimalism often expands their reach. "A new geography ... in the Internet age" The 365 National Festival represents a fascinating remediation that blurs the distinction between mass and local production. Remediation, as defined by Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin, refers to two related ten- dencies: the way new media present themselves as improved and more immediate versions of old media, and the way old media attempt to reassert their dominance and relevance by refashioning themselves in the 5 See Philip Kolin, "Redefining the Way Theatre Is Created and Performed: The Radical Inclusion of Suzan-Lori Parks's 365 Dqys/ 365 Plqys," Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism 22, no. 1 (Fall 2007): 65-83; Rebecca Rugg, "Radical Inclusion 'Til I t Hurts: Suzan-Lori Parks's 365 Dqys/ 365 Plqys," Theater 38, no. 1 (2008): 52-75; and Kathryn Walat, "These Are the Days: Suzan-Lori Parks's Year of Writing Dangerously Yields 365 Plays," American Theatre 23, no. 9 (2006): 26-27, 81-83. 10 MUSE image of the new.6 Theatrical microthons display the latter tendency: they remain live performance-an old medium, perhaps the oldest, and one predicated on presence and immediacy-but they reflect and respond to the encyclopedic impulses that characterize new media. In the case of the 365 Festival, Parks and the producers remediated the festival, a tradition- ally site-specific form, as a decentralized network. \'\fithout the internet, Parks's coordinated but non-hierarchical collaboration among eight hun- dred theatres would have been unfathomable.? The production team intentionally set out "to create a new geography for artistic productions in the Internet age,"8 and the resulting festival makes a compelling case study of the ways live theatrical activity is refashioning itself in the image of communications technologies that collapse distance and encourage simultaneity. Theorist Paul Virilio claims that the acceleration of media and transportation technologies during the twentieth and twenty-first cen- turies has worked to abolish time and distance, transforming events that once would have been site-specific (wars, catastrophes, celebrations, or performances) into global experiences beamed to a community of bil- lions at the same time. Virilio dubs this new decentralized territory of simultaneous mass spectacle "a city of the instant."9 Parks's festival was not transmitted live via satellite, but its international network relies on the internet to facilitate local, idiosyncratic performances. The project har- nesses new technology to create a festival of the global village, a city of many instants that exemplifies the recent convergence of top-down, authorial models of distribution and grass-roots participatory culture.10 A universe of theatres only became a constellation when connected by Parks's text, but the Festival coordinators urged each troupe to make the plays their own. Eight hundred diverse troupes each created seven live 6 Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin, Remediation: Understanding Nei/J Media (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2000), 3-15. 7 Rugg, one of the producers of the festival, admits that "[t]he experiment would be unima6rinable without the Internet, and it has proved to be a thoroughly contemporary, Web- and cell-phone-dependent producing experience." "Radical Inclusion," 57. 8 "365 Days/365 Plays," The Public Theater, http:/ /www.publictheater.org/365 (accessed 24 November 2006) . 9 Paul Virilio and Sylvere Lotringer, Pure War, translated by Mark Polizotti (New York: Semiotext(e), 1997), 87. 10 See Henry Jenkins, Convergence Culture: Where Old and Nei/J Media Collide (New York: New York University Press, 2006). EONS IN AN I NSTANT 11 performances: site-specific, available to a local audience, and part of a network that fostered regional community. But the festival's simultaneous live performances depended on a hypermediated and distributed produc- tion scheme. In an interview conducted during the build-up to the festi- val, Parks offered a new rubric to describe the goal of her dramatic work in general: "it's very much an Oberammergau thing."11 Referring to the German town that has performed a passion a play every ten years since the early seventeenth century, Parks said, "My plays are very much like that-the community gets together and creates .. . a new kind of com- munity pageant." 12 For Parks, a shrinking planet allows an enormously expanded community of distinct yet interconnected localities: a decen- tralized Oberammergau. Using the internet to coordinate geographically-specific and idio- syncratic performances around the world, the 365 Festival unsettles dis- tinctions between mass-produced global media and live performance event. For one, the festival's scope challenges Patrice Pavis's idea of the "limited range" of live theatre. Pavis takes for granted a distinction between broadcast media, which "easily multiply the number of their spectators, becoming accessible to a potentially infinite audience," and the intimate relationships fostered in the theatre, which "cannot tolerate more than a limited number of spectators."13 In theory, the radically inclusive 365 Festival-open to any performers and free for audiences- had a nearly unlimited range of spectators. In this sense, the festival offers the best realization yet of Philip Auslander's provocative idea that "live performances can be mass-produced."1 4 To support his suggestion, Auslander cites an earlier experiment in decentralized American theatre, the WPA Federal Theatre's 1936 production of It Can't Happen Here, which opened simultaneously in eighteen American cities. A play with eighteen premieres may not qualify as mass-production, but an event with seventeen distinct premieres of 379 plays surely does.15 A few pages ear- 11 Kevin]. Weanore, Jr., "It's an Oberammergau Thing: An Interview with Suzan-Lori Parks," in Suzan Lori Parks: A Casebook (New York: Routledge, 2007), 140. 12 i bid., 139-40. 1 3 Patrice Pavis, "Theatre and the Media: Specificity and Interference," in Theatre at the Crossroads qf Culture, translated by Loren Kruger (New York: Routledge, 1991), 101. 14 Philip Auslander, Liveness: Ptifomlance in a Mediatized Culture, second edition (New York: Routledge, 2008), 51. IS Despite its title, the cycle in fact contains 379 plays. Parks wrote two plays on some days, and three "Constants" that accompany the cycle. 12 MUSE lier in Liveness, Auslander suggests that in a "mediatized, repetitive econ- omy, using the technology of reproduction in ways that defy that econo- my may be a more significantly oppositional gesture" than insisting on the primacy of live performance. 1 6 Park's oppositional, media-enabled performance marathon suggests one can have it both ways: maintaining the primacy of live performance with all of its aura and immediacy, while taking advantage of a mediatized production network to expand the scope of the performance and level the playing field of the American theatrical establishment. Parks's name for her capacious hyper-democratic impulse is rad- ical inclusion.17 With regard to the festival, radical inclusion meant invit- ing any theatre in the world to participate by producing a week of the cycle anywhere they want, any way they want, for only a dollar a day in licensing fees. They could be staged readings, happenings, or fully pro- duced spectacles; one company performed i ts plays as a conference call radio drama. 18 Theatres were forbidden from charging admission, so the audience could include anyone, at least in principle. Radical inclusion also meant dismantling the traditional hierarchies and divisions regulating commercial theatrical output by giving well-heeled theatres and rogue troupes of disorganized thespians egual access to the productions in order, however temporarily, to redraw the map of the American theatre to reflect an increasingly flat world. As self-declared "hosts" of the festi- val, Parks and Metzgar were fond of saying: everyone's invited to the table, and "there's pie for everyone."19 The internet enabled Parks's rhetoric of radical inclusion by promising a digital table large enough in theory to accommodate anyone, but in practice the radicalism and range of the 365 Festival remained lim- ited. Parks and the producers clearly made good-faith efforts to cast a net as widely as current digital and theatrical networks would allow, but just how radically inclusive was the festival in the end? Despite the festival's sincere rhetoric about democracy and leveling, the "grassroots" festival would never have gotten off the ground without its central authorizing 16 Auslander, Liveness, 47, n30. 17 For more on radical inclusion in 365, see Rugg, "Radical Inclusion," espe- cially 56-62; and Kolin, "Redefining the Way Theatre Is Created and Performed," 65-83. 1 8 Sadie Dingfelder describes the production by the American Century Theater in "ACT does Theater Over the Phone," Washington City Paper, 15 December 2007. 19 ''About," 365 Days/365 Plays web site, http:/ /365days365plays.com/ about.php (accessed 9 September 2008). EONS IN t\N l NSTt\NT 13 figure, a Pulitzer-Prize-winning celebrity powerhouse of the American theatre. Anyone was invited to the table, but the menu had been set in advance, and was steeped in Parks's personality. Parks may be right that the 365 Festival offers pie for everyone, or at least petits fours, but the pri- mary reason theatres were willing to commit time, energy, and attention to these miniature recipes is that Parks has proven in the past that she can make some excellent pie, and producers and audiences trusted that at least some of the same ingredients would show up here. Compared to a recent fully-digital project like The WikiPlay-an ongoing collaboration which invites anyone, anywhere to contribute to a shared, multi-format, multilingual online script20_Parks's collaboration seems downright tradi- tional in its central focus on a year in the life of an individual playwright. Audiences too were by and large more traditional than radical. Anyone in the world was free to perform the plays, and all performanc- es were open to the public without charge, but the vast majority of those exposed to the project were already theatregoers or theatre students in the United States and in a handful of other countries. True, the festival production team hoped to build a fully and freely accessible mediated version of the festival, and requested that each theatre record their per- formances and upload videos to an online archive. The 365 Archive, if completed, would bring to fruition Kolin's suggestion that a cycle so resistant to staging "might best be realized as cyberspace, or digital the- atre, a theatre of virtual performance(s)" allowing spectators to "see vari- ations of the entire cycle."Zt But the small number of recordings available in the gallery so far-a mere dozen or so of the more than 6000 per- formances-suggests that the 365 Festival, unlike its published counter- part, will remain more local repertoire than global archive. Whatever the fate of the digital 365 Archive, Parks's year-long festival of shorts was already a form of digitally-enabled theatre, a reme- diated performance predicated on the dual contention that the live need not be local and that the global need not be televisual. The influence of new media, however, can only begin to account for the shape and multi- farious time signatures of Parks's microthon. 365 as Uncloseted Drama Although it is difficult to consider Parks's collection apart from the festi- 2 0 The WikiPlay, Unspun Theatre, http:/ /unspun.wikispaces.com (accessed 9 Septembet 2008). 21 Kolin, "Redefining the Way Theatre Is Created and Performed," 81. 14 MUSE val it spawned, 365 started as an insular, individual writing project allow- ing Parks to stretch her playwriting muscles while stretching the idea of a play. Before it was given to the crowd, it was a solo test of creative stam- ina that Parks compared to "running a marathon without the crowd cheering you on."22 After a bout of popularity following the more or less naturalistic Topdog/ Underdog, Parks found in the private rigor of 365 a daily method to reclaim and re-explore modes of formal experimentation that fueled her early plays. The commitment to start over each day was a real-world correlative of a theatrical style that, as Marc Robinson notes, "consciously tries for restlessness." 2 3 Like Clara in Adrienne Kennedy's A Movie Star Has to Star in Black and White, who vows to "do a page a day" despite her exhaustion, Parks too became a "a spectator watching [her] life," tracking her own manipulations of dramatic form.24 Even without knowing that Parks did not originally intend to publish or stage the plays, it would be easy to classify her collection as closet drama. The extreme brevity of the plays, their many impossible stage directions, and the daunting scale of the cycle as a whole all resist performance. The cycle largely operates according to its own intimate rhythms, so when Bonnie Metzgar convinced Parks to turn "intimacy ... outward" and uncloset the plays,2s their idiosyncrasy and difficulty became something akin to the productive antitheatricality that Martin Puchner identifies in modernist closet drama.26 The cycle's radical departures from traditional theatre were absorbed into the mainstream theatre community, and became the basis for its temporary reorganization. Much was gained in this uncloseting but some things were lost. As is often the case with theatrical shorts, many of 365's plays work bet- ter on the page than the stage. Parks's beautiful and complex stage direc- 22 \'V"etmore, "It's an Oberammergau Thing," 125. 23 Marc Robinson, The Other American Drama (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997), 195. 24 Adrienne Kennedy, A A1ovie Star Has to Star in Black and White, in Adrienne Kennet!J in One Act (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988), 82. 25 Joseph Roach, "An Interview with Suzan-Lori Parks and Bonnie Metzgar," Yale University, 14 November 2006, http:/ /wpp.research.yale.edu/wpp_events.php?id=2 (accessed 9 September 2008). 26 See Martin Puchner, Stage Fright: Modernism, Antithealricaliry, and Drama (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002). For more on the postmodern urge to uncloset supposedly impossible drama, see Nicholas Salvato, "Uncloseting Drama: Gertrude Stein and the Wooster Group," Modern Drama 50, no. 1 (2007 Spring): 36-59. EONS IN AN INSTANT 15 tions-liberated from parentheses, right-justified, and infused with nar- rative and poetic energies of their own-constitute a parallel text that demands attention as often as it directs action. Over the years, she has refined a battery of formal and typographical techniques that cram addi- tional meaning and direction into textual spaces. The most distinctive examples of Parks's penchant for condensing meaning are her signature "spells," instants of heightened silence built into scripts using figures' names followed by no dialogue. Insisting that charged silences are the places "where the figures experience their pure true simple state," Parks displays her faith, along with Maeterlinck and Beckett, that the essence of a character or play can be distilled in an instant.27 But in even the most faithful performances, audiences miss some of the nuance of Parks's "architectural" spells on the page.2S A few of the plays in 365 resemble spells liberated from their surrounding plays. At least once in the past, Parks wrote a spell that was its own scene,29 but these new pieces argue that a spell may constitute an entire play. Paper Tomatoes, for example, reprinted here in its entirety, turns on a single reaction: A Strongman strides in. Sits on a crate. Immediate!J People come in and throw 1vads of paper at him. Strongman Strongman R e s ~ This goes on for quite some time. Then thry leave. He sits there. He uses all his strength to hold back his tears.30 Here Parks revisits one of her cardinal themes, the cruelty of spectator- ship, through a dramatic lens at its most microscopic. Is this a play? Many traditional elements are here in miniature: inciting incident, rising action, conflict, and a final reversal. But if Paper Tomatoes works at all, it arguably 27 Suzan-Lori Parks, "Elements of Style," in The America Play and Other Works (New York: Theatre Communications Group, 1999), 16. 28 Ibid. 29 For an article-length discussion of this scene, "Scene 19: A Scene of Love (?)" in Venus, see Jennifer Johung, "Figuring the 'Spells' /Spelling the Figures: Suzan-Lori Parks's 'Scene of Love (?)'," Theatre journal 58, no. 1 (2006): 39-52. 30 Suzan-Lori Parks, 365 Days/ 365 Plays (New York: Theatre Communications Group, 2006), 234. 16 MUSE works only on paper or if the narration is read aloud. W'ithout the stage direction, "He uses all his strength to hold back his tears," we likely miss the play's central turn, its play on "strength" that revises our understand- ing of the label, "strongman." Reading the plays also radically changes their temporal stakes. Unlike a theatrical spectator, a reader can choose the size of her helping. She can take a break, skip ahead, reread a section, or stay as long as she likes. The flexibility of reading helps explain why long compilations of very short pieces are commonplace in published poetry, but rare and rad- ical on stage. Microthons, like all plays that experiment with time, are both more compelling and more challenging in performance because they impose unexpected rhythms on an audience. The cycle dictates rhythms as a book as well, but less radically. The structure of 365 has led some readers to adopt a daily reading schedule. Organized according to the days of composition, and too long to be read in one sitting, the col- lection invites readers to treat the book pseudo-devotionally, as a daily prayer book in the dramatic mode. The same calendrical structure that makes the plays stageable only in logistically daunting ways allows and encourages the regular, private ritual of reading. The world has largely measured the success of the unpreceden- ted 365 Festival by the novelty of its project and the loftiness of its goals rather than by the plays themselves. As a result, few critics and reviewers have discussed them in detail. In the next three sections, I argue that the plays of 365 reinscribe in miniature the paradoxes that drive the cycle as a whole. Attempting to embrace all subjects and peoples, they demon- strate hope in an utterly democratic dramaturgy while admitting the impossibility of such total inclusion. Endorsing both linear and cyclical modes of time, they simultaneously dismiss and reinforce the strictures of theatrical temporality. Finally, they demonstrate that stripping plays to their bare minimum can, somewhat unexpectedly, expand their signifi- cance. A Fragmentary Epic Radical inclusion governed not just the festival, but also the year of writ- ing. Park's project was not only to write a play a day for a year, but to con- tain a year in the life of her country and her planet in all its diversity. She makes admirable attempts to build an intentionally diverse and democrat- ic mosaic, but these attempts coexist with her awareness of the limits of radical inclusion as a dramaturgical ethos or as a political philosophy. Parks's encyclopedic microthon is a strange hybrid: everyone and every- EoNS IN AN INSTANT 17 thing is included, but none fully fleshed out; the scope is epic, but there's no hero (other than Parks) and no quest or direction. 365 is a union of atoms, a Whitmanesque epic composed of glimpses, a scrapbook history. For Parks, plays are "a way of creating and rewriting history through the medium of literature."3I Given the chance to document a year as it accumulated, she felt an acute burden to make her history inclu- sive. So i l g r i m ~ Progress (for Thanksgiving), shows a throng of pilgrims slowly and deliberately crossing the stage, but the directions call for pil- grims of every imaginable stripe-from Mayflower to Mecca, Canterbury to Varanasi, Western Wall to Mount Kailash-and demand, ''Accommodate as many as you can. Don't intentionally exclude any- body."32 Those lines could have been a mantra for Parks, whose cycle jux- taposes as many kinds of history as possible: geopolitical and local, national and African-American, mythic and quotidian, private and the- atrical. 365 reprocesses Parks's own history as a playwright by digging up themes from her earlier work-Abraham Lincoln and other dead presi- dents, holes and digging, race relations, absent fathers-and refreshes theatrical tradition by re-imagining classic works of the theatre, from The Tempest to The Seagull, in her own idiom. The radical hospitality of 365 strains to include even those plays the collection could not include. In Outtakes, a writer and an editor are surprised as the stage fills, paradoxically, w-ith a crowd of theatrical out- takes from the cycle: "some characters, some plays that u;erent even fui!J formed enough to get titles, like little almost-birds who fall out of the nest." The editor takes pity on them and announces, "We'll call the play 'Outtakes.' They'll be welcome here." 33 An even more poignant expression of the theme is Too Close, written when Parks had only two months of plays left to write. A Writer Woman holds a clear plastic bag, blows her nose, balls up the tissue, and drops it in the bag. She coughs into a napkin, examines the phlegm, balls it up, and adds it to the bag. She empties her pockets of countless tiny folded slips of paper covered with words, reads some, and carefully places each in the bag. Her brief monologue is a eulogy for the author's unnumbered thoughts that will never grow into brainchildren: You start thinking aft er awhile about the ones that got away. Not the ones you wrote. But the ones you didnt 31 Parks, "Possession," in America Plcry, 4. 32 Parks, 365/365, 33. 33 Ibid., 93. 18 write. Like the eggs that passed out of yr body without becoming babies. Or sperm, if yr a guy. Imagine if each one became somebody. Time is limited, I know, even in a work of this length. So Ive jotted down the un-includ- ed ones and put them in this plastic bag.34 MUSE Like the tomb of the unknown soldier, the bag of unknown characters is, along with its play, a placeholder, an anonymous memorial. Parks tries to preserve every scrap of mental detritus, and yet, even plays like Outtakes and Too Close that purport to include the lost, in the end serve as reminders of the impossibility of total inclusion and the inevitability of loss. Even in the longest of works, time and space are limited. Like all art, plays rely on selection, and in this sense, theatre of any length remains impoverished. Parks's love of encyclopedic diversity closely resembles that of an earlier American artist who also contains multitudes, Walt Whitman, for whom "nothing is too close, nothing is too far off" to be included.3S Just as Whitman's ecstatic embrace in Leaves of Grass includes everyone (the slave, the corpse, the prostitute), Parks's epic is a microcosm from which no creed, color, or class has been excluded. For both Whitman and Parks, however, extreme democratic leveling can lead to reductive con- Elations of difference. The exchange that concludes Pilgrims' Progress shrinks an impressive diversity of pilgrims to a thin idealistic capsule: Someone: All Pilgrims Someone Else: So different! Someone: But all going to the same place. Smiles all around 36 Naively or not, Parks shares Whitman's hope that a generous canvas can model and contribute to an inclusive society. Both authors push against the limitations of their media. Whitman yearns to collapse the distance between art object and viewer. "This is no book," he wrote in the 1860 edition of Leaves of Grass, 34 Ibid., 309. 35 Walt Whitman, Leaves ofGmss: The First (1855) Edition (New York: Penguin, 1959), 8. 36 Parks, 365/365, 33. EONS IN AN I NSTANT Who touches this, touches a man (Is it night? Are you alone?) It is I you hold, and who holds you, I spring from the pages into your arms.37 19 Parks shares Whitman's love of the capacious embrace that spills off the page and touches the world. The stage directions that comprise Parks's Something For Mom reach beyond the bounds of the play (or any play) and express her hope that a modest gesture, whether a play or a hug, can have a contagious and enormous effect: A Kid (you could even cast an actual child), holding a bunch of flmvers, runs toward Mother. Mother is surprised and happy. Kid presents flowers. Mother admires the flowers. Then, lifting Kid, Mother showers love. This happens several times, with other Mothers and other Kids. And "Mothers" and "Kids" are mutating and expanding to include all of us, filling the stage, the theatre, and the world, as the action continues and repeats forever. Even during peacetime. 38 The simplicity of the gesture and the lack of dialogue or conflict make this a minimal drama, but the closing stage directions ask it to expand to impossibly large proportions. This is stage direction as wish fulfillment, as a gesture of faith not only in a production team to execute the instruc- tions, but in the world to enact them. It is an experiment in viral joy. In this case, Parks bypasses the limitations of theatre by remediating it using the split screen conventions of video. The ending of Something for Mom asks for a f.tl.mic effect very similar to the ending of Love Actualb (2003), the British romantic comedy released, coincidentally, six months after Parks wrote the play (but three years before she published it). After two of the main characters of Love Actuai!J embrace in an airport, the real happy ending comes when the focus multiplies via split screen mitosis to include the hugs of ordinary people of all types and nations, expanding until the screen teems with a multicultural mosaic of miniature embraces (Figures 1 and 2). Like the f.tl.m, S omethingjor Mom may feel saccharine and 37 Walt Whitman, The ColJected Writings of Walt Whitman, edited by Gay Wilson Allen and Sculley Bradley (New York: New York University Press, 1961), 10: 611. 38 Parks, 365/365, 163. 20 MusE Figures 1 and 2 (opposite): Embraces multiply and divide in the final moments of Love Actuai!J. Directed by Richard Curtis. Copyright 2003, Universal Pictures. naive, but the 365 Festival at least partially brought the play's impossible instructions to fruition in late March of 2007, when at least seventeen different sets of multiple Mothers and Kids populated far-flung stages during the same week. A play that asks to include everyone highlights the impossibility of total inclusion, but the simultaneity and global reach of the 365 Festival began to unravel the paradox of a "mutating and expand- ing" action that fills the world, continues, and repeats forever. Plays with Time: An Eon in an Instant Who will hold the heart of man, so that it may stand still and see how steadfast eternity, neither future nor past, decrees times future and those past? St. Augustine, Confessions39 Somethingfor Mom is one of a number of plays in the collection that lasts forever. The "forever plays" are the most extreme examples of Parks's radically inclusive conception of time. Parks's plays have routinely dis- rupted and subverted linear time, allowing the historical past and the future to coexist and mingle in present moments that conflate "yesterday today next summer tomorrow" and "just uh moment ago."40 In 365, she 39 St. Augustine, The Confessions of St. Augustine, translated by John K. Ryan (New York: Doubleday, 1960), 285. 40 Parks, The Death of the Last Black Man in the Whole Entire World, in America Plqy, 102. EONS IN AN INSTANT 21 pushes the temporal flexibility of the theatrical moment to its extremes, creating individual plays that must be cataloged simultaneously among the shortest and the longest ever. Parks's temporal manipulations both reinforce traditional dramaturgy by exaggerating the ways theatre has always warped time (excerpting, eliding, dilating, or juxtaposing moments), and highlight the limitations of theatrical time by borrowing time signatures from other media, including film, art installations, and visual art. The plays of 365 provide a hyperbolic catalog of the ways the- atre distorts time. In some cases, like The 2nd Constant, a moment extends and becomes self-sufficient. This is the entire play: "Someone standing still. Thry could be dressed in mourning. The sound of wind or whales jorever."41 With The 2nd Constant, Parks finally calls Maurice Maeterlinck's bluff in "The Tragical in Everyday Life" that tragedy can consist in nothing other than someone waiting patiently and giving ear to the eternal. The phrase, "Someone standing still" follows Samuel Beckett in capitalizing on the ambiguity of the word "still," a word that, like this play, is simultaneous- ly frozen (to stand still) and continuous (to remain standing). Other plays drastically accelerate standard theatrical compression. The 3rd Foreign Dignitary in Abraham Lincoln at 89 docs a "beautiful and complicated" narrative dance relating a national epic. The stage direction that follows describes the central paradox of Parks's cycle: "It all took eons to happen and it all happened in an instant."42 The dignitary's dance instantiates the mythic simultaneity Parks aspires for in her national epic: a single theatrical ges- ture contains and distills larger narratives, histories, and times. As Maeterlinck cryptically suggests, the infmitesimal reveals "the concave 41 Parks, 365/365, x. 42 Ibid., 38. 22 MusE side of the illimitable."43 Most often, Parks bends linear time into cyclical patterns. The idea that "[t]ime has a circular shape" has long been a central hypothesis in her dramaturgical physics.44 If Parks has always seen the moment of performance as a fusion of past, present, and future, some plays from 365 replace repetition and revision with a form of strict repetition bor- rowed from film installations: the infinite loop. Father Comes home from the Wars (Part 11: His Eternal Return-A Plcry for My Father) is a "never-ending loop cif action" in which an unending series of five returning husbands twirl their wives and greet their children. 45 A complement to Somethingfor Mom, the play is a gift to Parks's military father who left and returned many times in her youth, as well as a gesture of impossible faith that the world's fathers will return home from their wars in perpetuity. The tension between linear and cyclical time in plays like this one reflects a parallel tension animating the project as a whole. On the one hand, Parks set a goal and marched resolutely forward toward its finale, including every- thing she could along the way to shore up a sense of comprehensive finality. On the other hand, 365 remains insistently a rycle shaped by the rhythms of diurnal and annual renewal. The project ends where it began on 12 November, and the promise of performance means the plays will be continually reinvented by new production teams. From one perspective, the forever plays are provocative hyper- bole, playful winks to readers and directors that invite creative solutions.46 As Rebecca Rugg describes, Parks's "open time signature" in 365liberates the plays and represents a tacit admission that all stagings will be approx- imate and provisional. 47 But from another angle, Parks may be serious when she claims that the plays last forever. Even before they are per- formed, Parks insists, "plays are complete-they just exist in another realm."48 This nee-Platonic definition keeps open the possibility of an 43 Maurice Maeterlinck, The Lift of Space, translated by Bernard Miall (New York: Dodd, Mead & Co, 1928), 122. 44 Parks, "Elements of Style," 11. 45 Parks, 365 I 365, 368. 46 Gregory ]\filler, "Everybody Lean Forward: Watching and Doing Times 365," paper given at American Literature Association Panel, May 2007. 47 Rugg, "Radical I nclusion," 54. 4R \X'etmore, "It's an Oberammergau Thing," 137. EONS IN AN INSTANT 23 ideal play that lasts forever in the mind, while inviting performers and directors to drag the idea into being in whatever way they may. The acci- dents of performance make do in time, but the plays themselves refuse to be bound by any time but their own. Like Parks, they answer to a high- er power. Nothing is Anything: Parks's Ontological Parables If the plays of 365 can be considered enormous on account of every- thing they include-in form, in content, and in time-a number of them gain magnitude on account of everything they exclude. The most fasci - nating kind of immensity in the plays is the scope created by the minimal gesture, the echo magnified by empty space. Like plays by Beckett and Pinter, Parks's spare dramas apply more widely because they do less. Of course all theatre-and all art, for that matter-relies on the accretion of meaning that comes from restricting one's view within a particular frame. Martin Essl.in makes this capacity a central theme of The Field of Drama: The stage or screen as a place where significant things are being exhibited elevates the most mundane objects and events to exemplary status, makes them significant beyond their mere individual being: they become signs for multitudes of similar objects and events. Any object, any gesture thus is potentially redolent of possible metaphorical or symbolic meaning, far beyond its literal or factual function in the performance.49 Esslin's remarks apply Viktor Shklovsky's concept of defamil.iarization, or Marcel Duchamp's insistence that art consists only in the framing, to the stage and the screen.so But the scale of the frame also makes a dif- ference. Minimal art revises Esslin's account by teaching us that the nat- ural tendency of artistic framing to make objects significant can increase as the size and complexity of the field decreases.s 1 A bushel of apples in 49 Martin Esslin, The Field of Drama: Hotv the Signs in the Drama Create Meaning on Stage and Screen (London: Methuen, 1987), 163. SO Brecht's Veifmndungsifftkt also redeployed Shklovsky in a theatrical context, but where Brecht advocated particular strategies to produce estrangement, Esslin con- tends that things on a stage are always already strange. 51 Of course, some minimal artists resist the idea that their creations mean any- thing at all. But the literalist stance, summarized most famously in Frank Stella's tautol- 24 MusE the back of Mother Courage's wagon likely means somewhat more than one in your house, but an apple alone on a bare stage cannot help but stand in for the idea of an apple, and is more likely to suggest Eve's temp- tation or Newton's discovery or New York City, or perhaps all three at once. Like Beckett, Parks takes advantage of spare or unmarked the- atrical spaces to create ontological parables.sz A parable operates by com- pressing vast moral or spiritual insights into an apparently simple story. The lack of identifying features in Parks's minimal parables adds meta- physical resonance to their implications. She winks at this tendency with the meta-parable, Empty, a play devoid of context that ruminates on the freedom afforded by an empty apartment, a blank canvas, or an empty stage: Its empty. Yeah. Its- really-very- Empty. Yes. I told you it was. I had to see for myself.53 TUJo speakers. One speaker, familiar with the space, has brought another who is skepti- cal at first, but soon understands that emptiness provides its own immen- sity: At!)thing could happen here because- Because nothing's happening here right now? Yr sort of getting the hang of it. How do you feel? Less empty. Or-empty but ok. ogy, "What you see is what you see," rarely applies to minimalism in the theatre, about which one could almost say "what you see is always both what you see and what you don't see." Quoted in "Questions to Stella and Judd," an interview by Bruce Glaser, edited by Lucy Lippard, in Minima/Art: A Critical Anthology, edited by Gregory Battock (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1968), 168. 52 I borrow this term from the title of Lance St. John Butler's Samuel Beckett and the Meaning o/ Being: A Stut!J in Ontological Parable (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 1984). 53 Parks, 365/365, 90. EONS IN AN INSTANT Y r gonna go far. I can tell. You think? I'm betting on it. Gee. Yeah. (Rest) Tell me something. Whered everything go, you think? Good question. Dunno. Cool. 5 4 25 Parks gets a kick out of her own provocative reticence. Providing less direction liberates directors, producers, and readers to discover their own meanings in the spare landscapes of 365. In plays like this, Parks removes context to make the conversation echo beyond itself, taking advantage both of the tendency of the miniature to refer to itself, and of the human penchant to interpret the ordinary in symbolic terms. Parks's tendency to build plays around a single gesture or metaphor can lead to facile reduction. In 1 and 2, a man enters stage left walking backward two steps, forward one step, backward two steps, and so on until he collapses from exhaustion and sobs. Similarly, in Almost Perfect a character whose sign reads ''Almost Perfect" is profoundly disap- pointed when he meets another whose sign reads "Perfect." Parks's habit of announcing the tenor of her single-serving allegories, ostensibly another gesture of hospitality, weakens this play and others in 365 by reducing them to a single idea and leaving the spectator with little work to do. Parks's sign-posting seems to indicate, somewhat ironically, her lack of faith in the meaning-generating capacity of the theatre, or at least her awareness that building an allegory quickly is difficult. Beckett's shorts, by contrast, almost never announce the terms of their metaphors, and they are all the more remarkable for it. In the past, Parks has resisted decod- ing the blueprints her plays provide, and has looked down on plays based on a single transparent idea: "I think that the playwright provides the map. But I think a bad play only has a one-way road. Yes, I think the bad play has one road; one idea, one message, one way of doing it."55 If some of Parks's single-idea parables feel like one-way roads, others gain grace and poignancy from their economy. This is the hope of Live Free or Die. As the play begins, the Furies line either side of the stage. A mythical 5 4 Ibid. 55 Shelby Jiggets, "Interview with Suzan-Lori Parks," Callaloo 19, no. 2 (1996): 312. 26 MusE murderess enters, hands bloody. She picks up speed when she sees the Furies, throws her body toward them, and comes heart-wrenchingly close to breaking their ranks: We see it in slow motion, like a sprinter through a tape, every muscle strained to cross the finish line, but then the tape, instead tif breaking, holds her qy the hands. They remain extended like this. She pulls away as they pull her back. Lights out. 56 This is a play reduced to a single gestus, theatre approaching the condition of sculpture. The play's conceit-that struggling against fate is like play- ing an impossible game of Red Rover organized by the Furies-may be hokey, but as a piece of unadorned kinesthetic tragedy, it creates a stage moment that personifies the unassailable web of guilt and retribution binding those who try to kill their way out of a problem. That the play also serves as a parable about 365 makes it all the more resonant. Again and again in 365, Parks throws everything she has at limitations and boundaries, but instead of breaking, the limits stretch, accommodate the assault, and create something new held together by its tensions. The Window o/ Opportunity, written in the first week of the cycle, is a diminutive ontological parable that displays all of the kinds of minia- ture magnitude I have discussed so far: it includes everything, means everything, and contains all time. Like the Great Hole of History in The America Play, the window in The Windou; o/ Opportunity uses the space of the stage to resuscitate a dead metaphor and invest it with significance. Onstage, window curtains cover an ordinary window. A uniformed fig- ure, the Window Meister, enters to perform his official duty. He checks his watch, checks the wind, then takes a deep breath. He draws the cur- tains, opens the window "with a great flourish," stands at attention, and announces, "The Window of Opportunity is now open!"S 7 At first, noth- ing happens. Then the curtains start to flutter in the breeze, and conti- nue as the Window Meister announces the passage of absolutely every- thing to date in a dizzyingly abbreviated paragraph: Window Meister: Ellipses. Ellipses. Before. The Dawn of Time. The Creation of the Universe. Ellipses. The fish crawls out of the sea. Ellipses. Olduvai Gorge. 56 Parks, 365/365, 304. 57 Ibid., 9. EoNs JN AN lNST.'\NT 27 Figure 3: Rachel Holmes as The One Who Got Away and Joan Macintosh as Window Meister in The Public Theater production of The Window of Opportunity. Directed by Michael Greif. Photo copyright Michal Daniel, 2006. Ellipses. Homo Erectus in God's image. Ellipses. Gods, Gods and more Gods. The Rise. The Fall. Ellipses. Ellipses. Ellipses. Confucius and the Buddha. Ellipses. Jesus. Ellipses. Ellipses. United States version: Mayflower and Indians and Slavery; Washington Crossing the Delaware. Ellipses. Civil War. Ellipses. The War to End All Wars. Ellipses. Ellipses. All universal events of great significance up to and including the Present Day.s8 The Window Meister announces that the Window is closed, and a moment later someone enters running, but has arrived just a moment too late. The Meister offers a word of encouragement, "Look at it this way: Y r 'The One Who Got Away.' . .. Maybe next time.''59 These words are small consolation to the figure, who leaves with a heavy heart, but the play itself represents some consolation. Parks is obsessed with the absences and holes in history- everything elided by the many ellipses in 58 Ibid. 59 Ibid., 10. 28 MUSE the Window Meister's speech-and thinks of her plays as parallel histo- ries that make space for those who got away from traditional histories: theatre, for me, is the perfect place to "make" history- that is because so much of African-American histor y has been unrecorded, dismembered, washed out, one of my tasks as playwright is to ... locate the ancestral bur- ial ground, dig for bones, find bones, hear the bones sing, write it down .... I'm re-membering and staging historical events which, through their happening on stage, are ripe for inclusion in the canon of history.6o In this case, Parks restages the holey whole of history in less than a minute, and makes the tragic protagonist a representative for those his- tory forgot. But The Windon; of Opportunity is not just a parable about African-American or other subaltern history; it is also an expression of the futile race against fate, as well as a parable about the theatre, and a reflexive commentary on 365. The Window Meister pulling back the cur- tain ("perhaps a gorgeous portion of purple velvet drapery") is also a stage manager. As the title suggests, any play is a window of opportun- ity, a structure that invites us to view a world through a small frame for a limited time. That the figure's name, The One Who Got Away, is the same name Parks uses in Too Close to describe the ideas she couldn't record ("you start thinking about the ones that got away'') reveals a per- sonal thrust to the metaphor.6 1 When she wrote this fourth play in the series, Parks had just begun a race against time, a race to add something to the history of everything by opening her own window of opportun- ity and trying to let in all of those who tend to get away. The title of The Window of Opportunity renders its metaphor more or less as transparent as its window. Arguably, Parks could have had more faith in the capacity of the stage to generate its own meaning. Open a window on a bare stage and let the wind blow through it, and you already have a window of opportunity, a breath of fresh air, an opening onto possibility. For that matter, she may not have needed the window at all, because the stage is always already a frame, and left alone will signify one. At the end of her compositional odyssey, fifty-one weeks after writing The Window of Opportunity, Parks found that you can tell a story with wind and light moving through an empty stage: 60 Parks, "Possession," 4. 61 Parks, 365/365,309. EONS IN AN INSTANT The Blank Before the World A very s/01v light cue, as slow as possible, from deep black to Jvhite-hot zoom. The light reveals the stage, which is complete!J blank. (Is this possible?) The light cue is accompanied f?y a sound of wind- the wind which brought most of us here to this country or this planet. Then, the wind reveals itse!f to be an enormous!J elongated single breath. When the light cue has reached its maximum and the breath has expired-the lights bump out quick!J. 62 29 This penultimate play in the cycle restages Beckett's 30-second play, Breath, with several key re\isions that convert a pessimistic parable into a hopeful hymn to theatrical possibility. Like Breath, it has no characters and no dialogue, and consists in a single light cue, up and down, coordinated with the sound of a slow single breath. But instead of a stage full of trash, we see a completely blank stage full of potential. Like Breath, this script is all stage direction, but where Beckett employs mannered techni- cal instructions, Parks's stage direction is a free verse poem with strategic line breaks. Putting the parenthetical, "Is this possible?" on its own line makes it not only a question about whether a stage can ever truly be blank, but also a wink at her own audacity: Is this play possible? Similarly, the line break that separates "the wind which brought most of us here to this country" from the next line, "or this planet," registers hesitation between a story about migration and American possibility, and a story about the creation of the world. Crucially, where Beckett's light rises and falls together with breath, Parks's version gives us one long sunrise. As the human breath gives out, hot light illuminates a blank stage. Beckett's play witnesses the end of the world; The Blank Before the World oversees its birth. Like Beckett, Parks understands the way the theatre encourages our natural tendency to organize even blank light and empty time into a story. Both playwrights capitalize on the human instinct to mythologize, to read the rhythms of the natural world-sunrise and sunset, inhalation and exhalation-as signs laden with metaphysical import. Paul Ricoeur writes that "Time becomes human to the extent that it is organized after the manner of narrative."63 While it might seem to have no story to tell, The 62 Ibid. 376. 63 Paul Ricoeur, Time and Narrative (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), 3. 30 MUSE Blank Before the World has a clear beginning, middle, and end. It organizes time after the manner of narrative so as to render even a very short peri- od of time without any visible human presence, manifestly hopeful. What may seem like a rebuke to dramatic convention is in fact a testament to the deep and tenacious conventions that structure our always dramatiz- ing imaginations. At the end of The Blank Before the World, the quick blackout may seem like a surprise apocalypse, until we realize that this play is part of a pair. The next and final play in the cycle is among the shortest ever pub- lished: 365 Days/365 Plays Lights bump back up to 1vhite-hot. Zoom. Onstage, the manuscript of365 Days/365 Plays.6 4 This is a "ta-dah" moment, of course, that borrows an exclamation point from cinematography to reveal the child of Parks's year-long artistic labor, the world after the blank. But it is also an act of humility. If the plays of 365 are daily offerings to the theatre, the final play in the series offers the manuscript as a gift to the world. The breath of creation has faded, but its offspring will be reanimated through performance. In light of the many paradoxes of 365- its hypermediated immediacy, its public intimacy, its fragmented community, its inter- minable moments, and full voids-Parks's project emerges as a dance of controlled surrender, a balancing act between formal rigor and expansive freedom. As she puts it, "Discipline is a lattice on which a vine can grow."65 Bound by a commitment to daily composition, Parks was liber- ated to tinker with dramatic form. 365 marches in step with the calendar, yet everywhere creates its own ways to measure time. The plays cannot escape their dates of composition which are printed just before each title, but they routinely evade everyday time. Honing plays to minimal gestures, Parks frees them to work parabolically. A cognate tension made the fes- tival possible. Parks and Metzgar built for themselves the largest American theatre collaboration in history only by surrendering the plays to the world. This equipoise between flexibility and tension used to be part of Parks's rhetoric. Ten years ago, before she embraced radical inclu- sion, she described her plays this way: 64 Parks, 365/365, 376. 65 Roach, ~ Interview With Suzan-Lori Parks and Bonnie Mezgar." EONS IN AN INSTANT Plays have to be soft and loose and complete!J flexible and complete!J taut, to withstand the minds, and hearts, and souls of thousands of hundreds of people, and actors getting in there and saying, "What's my motivation?" And directors going, ''What are we going to do at this moment?" ... It's like someone who's practiced yoga for nine million years. They're incredibly strong and incred- ibly flexible at the same time. That's what a play has to be.66 31 In yoga-both individual and communal, spiritual and athletic, inclusive and rigorous-we find an image that encapsulates the paradoxical strength and flexibility of Parks's capacious microthon.67 66 Suzan-Lori Parks, Interview b)' Han Ong, in Speak Theater and Film!: Tbe Best of Bomb Magai'{!te's Interviews with Playwrights, A ctors, and Directors, edited by Betsy Sussler (Australia: G + B Arts International, 1999), 176, emphasis mine. 6 7 As Kolin notes, C. Denby Swanson also describes 365 in terms of yoga: "What's happening ... around the country is large-scale yoga drama: breaching together, observing together, giving attention." ''Yoga drama," Austin Chronicle, 10 November 2006, http:/ /www.austinchronicle.com/ gyrobase/J ssue/ story?oid=oid:418608 (accessed 16 February 2009). JOURNAL OF AMERICAN DRAMA i\ND THEATRE 22, NO.1 (WINTER 2010) "COMING OUT OF THE CLOSET": RE-READING Tim BoYS IN 7HE BAND AND ON A MUGGY NIGHT IN MUMBAI Ashis Sengupta Mart Crowley's The Bqys in the Band (1968) and Mahesh Dattani's On a Muggy Night in Mumbai (1998), despite all temporal distance and cultural difference, come fairly close to each other in dealing with issues of (homo)sexuality. Crowley's play, preceding the Stonewall riots by a year, in fact presages them in a modest manner; Dattani's is the first Indian play to bring out the "travails of gay men and women'' in India and inter- rogate the normality/ normativity of heterosexuality. 1 When Bqys opened off-Broadway in 1968, it was the first "mainstream [American] play" to approach homosexual life on its own terms. Until then, gays on stage or screen were "objects of pity or derision."Z With gays increasingly redefin- ing themselves as "strong and proud" ever since 1969, the play has been criticized for its "low [gay] self-esteem."3 But re-read in the context of its time, it will appear fairly bold in putting on the stage a longstanding taboo subject. Twenty-seven years after the play was first produced, Crowley defended his work by saying that he had known "a lot of people" like his "boys," whose self-esteem (read: self-loathing) was born out of "a sense of what the times told you about yourself." 4 Muggy Night, on the other hand, opened in Mumbai in 1998, when the Indian attitude (to use that generalizing term) toward gays was not very different from that prevalent in the United States until Stonewall. Dattani admits that he himself did not expect the drama "to play to mainstage audiences," though it did- thanks to the director's "perseverance and grit."S The playwright's appre- hensions do not sound ungrounded when we recall the howls of protest Deepa Mehta's film Fire (released roughly a week after Dattani's play was first produced) met from the political Right, including its women's fac- tions. If Mehta's work (which, as a fllm, enjoyed a larger audience) basi- 1 Mahesh Dattani, Preface, Collected Plays (New Delhi: Penguin Books India, 2000), xiv. 2 Edward Guthmann, "'70s Gay Film Has Low Esteem Boys attitude' seems dated," http:/ / www.sfgate.com/chronicle (accessed 23 May 2005). 3 Ibid. 4 Mart Crowley, quoted in Guthmann, "70's Gay Film." 5 Dattani, Preface, xiv. 34 SENGUPTA cally deals with female homoeroticism, Dattani's "metrosexual love story"-as he calls it-unravels multiple facets of gay culture in a coun- try where "homosexuality" is still punishable by law. Muggy Night is not simply the first Indian play to handle such a theme, as John McRae main- tains, but shows "how society creates patterns of behaviour" to which individuals fall victim so easily.6 Unlike Crowley's Bqys, it has a lesbian character in it, and some of the gay men are strongly anti-heterosexual. If Dattani's play lends a stronger voice to all deviant sexualities, including those elided by a gay identity, it is so because contemporary global devel- opments in the realm of sexual identity somehow form the subtext of a play that otherwise addresses a conservative society in this regard. This paper seeks to show how both plays, by challenging compulsory hetero- sexuality, rewrote gay history on the stage-American and Indian-at different times and in different ways. In "Teaching the 'Boys': Mart Crowley in the Millennia] Classroom," Michael R. Schiavi seeks to find out why his class at New York University, of which two-thirds openly identified as gay, lesbian, or bisexual, vehemently rejected the play as a most "hateful" piece-he had expected a more empathetic reading of the pre-Stonewall gay male char- acters. Schiavi identifies three reasons for the "debacle": his students "demanded from stagings of homosexuality total ravishment of mind and/ or body, whether actors' or spectators"'; he overestimated their knowledge of gay history and therefore did not recommend adequate historical reading; and he "allowed insufficient time for textual discus- sion, much less contextualization" of the work.? A little homework is indeed necessary for appreciating the play as a period piece, and for understanding why William Friedkin's 1970 film adaptation occasioned the first protest by gays against a Hollywood fllm later regarded as "a turning point in the evolution of gay theatre."s The play's "dense refer- entiality"-as self-evident in the characters' "film-spun banter," their "specialized language skills," and allusions to contemporary cultural denominators of homosexuality-would also explain why Crowley had two "training films" prepared by a friend of his for members of the Bqys' 1996 WPA Theatre revival cast.9 6 John McRae, "A Note on the Play," in Dattani, Collected Plqys, 47. 7 Michael R. Schiavi, "Teaching the 'Boys': Mart Crowley in the Millennia] Classroom," Modern Language Studies 31, no. 2 (2001): 84, 87. 8 Don Shewey, quoted in Schiavi, "Teaching the 'Boys,"' 77. 9 Schiavi, "Teaching the 'Boys,"' 79. "COIVUNG OUT OF THE CLOSET" 35 Set during a gay birthday party in Manhattan, Bqys brings togeth- er "six tired screaming fairy queens and one anxious queer," to leave aside the supposedly straight Alan. 1 o The opening dialogue between Michael and Donald, replete with dishy one-liners, has frequent references to depression, psychiatry, and the like-suggesting "psychoanalytic culture's determination" to equate homosexuality with sickness and to treat gay men and lesbians by making them "'talk' themselves out sexual 'immatu- rity."'! I The effect of such social and medical policing was guilt and depression. Larry's ''A lot of guys have to get loaded to have sex"; 12 Michael's "I was still in the 'Christ-was-1-drunk-last-night syndrome"' 1 3 and ''You show me a happy homosexual, and I'll show you a gay corpse"14-all point to the quality of gay life in a predominandy homo- phobic and heterosexual society. Constructionists would argue that although people might have always engaged in same-sex erotics, "such individuals did not necessarily assume an oppositional stance to society that resulted in a clear sense of sexual identity."1S The transformation of the social discourse on sexuali- ty in the nineteenth century gave birth to specific sexual identities; "the new psycho-medical designation of 'homosexual' [as a species] allowed for a categorization of feelings and encounters that resulted in ... a well- defined homosexual identity."16 As Sara Ahmed argues, "Oeffrey] Week's positing of ... the homosexual alongside the bracketed figure of the het- erosexual is crucial."1 7 The emergence of the idea of "sexual orientation" does not situate the two figures "in a relation of equivalence." The homo- sexual was always presumed to have an "orientation" while the hetero- 10 Mart Crowley, The B'!)'S in the Band, in Best American Plqys, edited by Clive Barnes (New York: Crown, 1975), 496. 11 Schiavi, "Teaching the 'Boys,"' 87. 12 Crowley, The Bqys in the Band, 502. 13 Ibid., 501. 14 Ibid., 527. 15 Donald E. Hall, "Identity," in glbtq: An Encyclopedia of Gqy, Lesbian, Bisexual, Transgender, and Queer Culture, http:/ /www.glbtq.com/literature/idcntity.htrnl (accessed 12 March 2006). !6 Ibid. 17 Sara Ahmed, Queer Phenomenology (Durham: Duke University Press, 2006), 69. 36 SENGUPTA sexual was supposed to be neutral. 1 8 Once the hetero-homo binary became pronounced, there were terrifying odds, including legal, against gay friendship/relationship. The threats modern gays had to confront are underscored by Emory's feigning a police raid on his arrival at Michael's. Their lifestyle, in the absence of social acceptance and recognition, is characterized by the "cycle" of partying and drinking in order to forget "what did I do last night!"l 9 An analyst's counseling would bring about a gnawing sense of guilt in them, pushing them further into a world of "aspirin, Alka-Seltzer, Darvon, [and] Dapraisal." Thanks to such repres- sive ideology, Michael "really thought [he] was straight" and "didn't think [he] was lying to [him]self." 20 Donald is too self-hating to consider him- self healthy or pursue a career, a "classic Freudian stereotype of arrested development . . . linked to psychoanalytic interpretation."21 Many gay men had to get married and have children. Under compulsion, they were living a double life. Michael mocks the "quaint little idea-if a man is married, then he is automatically heterosexual."22 Gay performance had traditionally been equated with "non-stop camp."23 In contemporary critical parlance, "camp" is defined, as Nigel Wheale puts it, "as the culture and taste of marginal groups who cele- brate the fact of their marginality through parody and self-mockery."2 4 It is, however, believed to have originated from the acceptance of gayness as "effeminacy"-a belief that runs through Crowley's play. "Camp" also gradually came to be extended to all things "over the top."25 Harold the birthday boy is always afraid of losing his physical beauty and "spends hours getting ready," as Larry says, "before he can go out." Michael 18 Ibid. 19 Crowley, The Bqys in the Band, 500. 20 Ibid., 500-01. 21 John M. Clum, Acting Gqy: Male Homosexuality in Modern Drama (New York: Columbia University Press, 1992), 255. 22 Crowley, The Bqys in the Band, 518. 23 Schiavi, "Teaching the 'Boys,"' 80. 24 Nigel Wheale, quoted in Jeremy Hawthorn, A Glossary of Contemporary Literary Theory (London: Arnold, 2000), 33. 25 Martin P. Levine, Gqy Macho (New York: New York University Press, 1998), 72. "COMING OUT OF THE CLOSET" 37 reacts: "Faggots are worse than women about their age. They think their lives are over at thirty."26 Michael was frail and pale as a child, and had always heard his mother complain that he "should have been a girl."27 Emory, the most effeminate of these gays who would "make somebody a good wife,"28 describes Donald as "the most exotic woman" and calls Bernard "the African queen."29 Dancing, an act once despised by "he- men," is a moment of fulfillment for Michael. Significantly, all this is pit- ted against the explicit markers of conventional male sexuality. Michael and Emory are chided for spending "their childhood in a movie house"30 away from "the masculine pastimes of baseball and lawn-mowing."3 1 The supposedly straight Alan finds himself at ease only in Hank's company because he takes the married man for a confirmed hetero with whom he can have a man-to-man talk.3 2 The female impersonation at this level remains within the framework of gender difference and is played against an exaggerated masculinity which also governs relationships between gay men. The midnight cowboy, a hustler and birthday present for Harold, exemplifies the butch-femme binary. One comes across such gender dif- ference as early as when Michael tells Donald that the "hair spray'' in question has the words "For Men" written about thirty times all over "the goddamn can."33 This is how standard psychoanalytic types are sustained. "The actions of the characters become performances," Clum writes, "watched and judged by the 'normal' outsider who offers society's judg- ments, which the characters ... readily accept."34 As regards the gay protest against the Hollywood adaptation of the play, the objection was as much to the representation of gays as 26 Crowley, The Bcrys in the Band, 512. 27 Ibid., 498. 28 Ibid., 513. 29 Ibid., 500, 505 30 Ibid., 516. 31 Schiavi, "Teaching the ' Boys,"' 79. 32 Alan Sinfield, Out on Stage: Lesbian and Ccry Theatre in the Twentieth CentUI)' (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999), 301-302. 33 Crowley, The Bcrys in the Band, 495. 34 Clum, Acting Ccry, 255. 38 SENGUPTA "effeminate" men as to their supposedly unrelieved self-loathing.3s If screenwri ter Barry Sandler found in the boys an "incredible sense of camaraderie,"36 there were many gays who felt "frightened of all that bit- ter wit and self-flagellation"3 7 and accused Crowley of romanticizing "the bravery and wit shown by the Boys in coping with 'the unlucky hand' fate had dealt them."38 The "truth game," a device that Crowley borrowed from "Get the Guests" in Whos Afraid of Virginia Woo!f?, presents the boys' mutual laceration as the only way to come out. Each would call up his love and tell him about it. Alan is desperate to leave and take Hank with him. But he stays on for reasons not made clear while Hank declares his love for Larry. Bernard confesses to his secret passion for a straight boy (Peter) in Detroit years ago, with whom he "made it" one night after a drunken swimming party but who pretended next morning "like noth- ing at all had happened."39 Emory had a crush on a high school boy (Delbert) seven years his senior, and without his knowing it; bur Delbert was engaged to a girl whom he married later. Hank dials Larry's number and leaves the message that he loves him and .in the process shocks Alan. Michael's laceration reaches its height when he pressures Alan to admit that he had slept with Justin Stuart (whom Alan considers just a very good friend) and compels him to call him. Alan outwits Michael by call- ing his wife. Harold calls Michael "a sad and pathetic man ... . A homo- sexual ... [who] may very well one day be able to know a heterosexual life if you want it desperately enough ... but (who] will always be homo- sexual as well."40 Harold may be trying to essentialize the gay sensibility, but he also parodies Michael's own words against Alan: "you couldn't face the truth . .. you lied to yourself." 41 Michael eventually surrenders to Donald, his Donnie, and realizes that they should not have hated each other "quite so very much." Yet the price of "coming out" has been too hard to forget. It is not certain, even as the curtain comes down, why 35 Crowley, The Bqys in the Band, 523. 36 Barry Sandler, quoted in Schiavi, "Teaching the 'Boys,"' 78. 37 Paul Monette, quoted in ibid. 38 Martin Duberman, quoted in ibid. 39 Crowley, The Bqys in the Band, 518. 4 0 Ibid., 526. 41 Ibid. "COMING OUT OF THE CLOSET" 39 Alan came there or whether he is really straight or whether he wanted to confess but ultimately preferred going back to his heterosexual life on seeing the violence the men did to each other as well to themselves. "All that self-hating angst, all those demoralizing confessions," Brantley observes, are "not exactly supportive images for a minority struggling to become visible."42 As Wheale writes, camp "can also be seen as the (semi-)tolerat- ed public face of the unaccepted." In the past it had been the way in which homosexuals were able to "display their sexual orientation without admitting to it." 43 "l'f]he mode of camp which undermines the categories which exclude it, and does so through parody and mimicry," informs the character of Emory.44 When Larry says that he discovered him "leaning against a lamppost," Emory fill s in: "With an orchid behind my ear and big wet lips painted over the lipline."45 Or when Donald asks if every- body is ready for a drink, Emory, "flipping up his sweater," wants to plqy their "topless cocktail waitress."46 Emory not only describes himself and the other "boys" as "women" but uses a masculine pronoun for Alan's wife. Provoking Alan, Emory takes what Dollimore calls the "pervert's revenge on authenticity" and in turn invites a beating from Alan. The masquerade of camp thus becomes less self-concealment than a kind of attack.47 If the traditional gay types-such as butch, screaming queen, and hustler-still remain in place, the familiar motifs of gay representa- tion are reprised by Crowley to point to their constructedness and thus open up the possibility of their reconstruction.48 Sinfield refers to Robert Brustein's complaint about the cowboy figure in the plays of Tennessee Williams and William Inge-"the 'male impersonator,' who wears blue 42 Ben Brandey, "As the Boys Return, The Party Isn't Over," Nm- York Times, 21 June 1996, http:/ /www.theater2.nytimes.com/mem/theater/treview.html (accessed 10 May 2006). 43 Nigel Wheale, quoted in Hawthorn, A Glossary, 34-5. 44 Jonathan Dollimore, "Post/modern: On the Gay Sensibility, or the Pervert's Revenge on Authenticity," in Literary Theories: A Reader and Guide, edited by Julian Wolfreys (New York: New York University press, 1999), 556. 45 Crowley, Tbe Bqys in the Band, 501. 46 Ibid., 503. 47 Dollimore, "Post/modern," 553. 48 Sinfield, Out on Stage, 300-01. 40 SENGUPTA jeans, cowboy boots, and T-shirt and is credited with athletic prowess, but 'hides fundamental insecurities behind an exaggerated show of male- ness."'49 Cowboy in Bqys, according to Michael, "looks straight out of a William Inge play,"50 "but in this instance there is no discreet ambiva- lence" as Cowboy is hired for the night as Harold's birthday present.5 1 Manly American manners are largely undermined by latency and repres- sion. "This question is actualized on the stage," to quote Sinfield again, "by Hank and Alan, both of whom appear straight, are married and have children."52 Both of them also play tennis, a "man's game." While Hank leaves his family for Larry, Alan ends up assaulting Emory as he realizes he is at a gay party. Alan's fear could be either homophobia or "the hys- teria of latency," though the play never implies that every hetero is homo- phobic and anyone who seems gay really is so. The image of gay men as sick creatures fighting themselves lingers untill the end. But the impact of the play goes beyond its explicit statements and helps to "dislodge the ... conditions that had determined those models."53 Moreover, Hank and Larry provide, it seems today, positive role models. Their happiness, despite their different attitudes toward fidelity, points toward "distinctive and sensible kinds of relations among gay people."54 Whatever one thinks of it, as playwright William M. Hoffman notes, "The Bqys in the Band, more than any other single play, publicized homosexuals as a minority group."S5 The performance, as well as the film, has been dis- missed on contrasting grounds: heterosexuals found it a reassuring pic- ture of the unhappy lives of gays and gay men saw it as a quaint period piece. But fllm critic Vito Russo believes that the fllm "summed up a gen- eration of gay men who were taught to blame all their troubles on their homosexuality."S6 What the outsider and the audience now see and hear 4 9 Ibid. 50 Crowley, The Bqys in the Band, 508. 51 Sinfield, Out 011 Stage, 301. 5 2 Ibid. 53 Ibid., 302. 5 4 Ibid., 300. 55 William M. Hoffman, qtd. in Clum, Acting Gay, 254. 56 Vito Russo, quoted in Clum, Acting Gay, 254. Emphasis mine. "COMI NG OUT OF THE CLOSET" 41 is purported to be a slice of the "'off-stage' activities of closeted gay characters" when they are not playing straight. "For the first time, main- stream audiences see gay men," Clum rightly observes, "talk openly about their sexual predilections, dance together, kiss, and retire upstairs for sex." 57 The ending still does not sound positive to several critics. It is most unlikely that after all that has occurred in his apartment Michael as a gay man would find much solace in the midnight mass he goes to. Doric Wilson's Street Theatre parodies him and Donald as "the most eloquent spokesmen for the men in power."58 They are the only gay characters in Wilson, Clum continues, who "attack the participants in the Stonewall riots from the sidelines."5 9 "The revolt dramatized in Street Theatre is not so much against outside forces," writes Clum, "as it is against the inter- nalization of those forces ... [which] maintains the closet and prevents community."6o Crowley's play dramatizes "the sadder elements of gay his- tory" rather than parodying them; yet it uses parody in its own way to cre- ate positive images of gay men.61 "While positing unhappy isolation for most of its characters," Clum observes, "The Bqys in the Band also defined a subgenre of gay dramas about redefining the rules of gay men's rela- tionships."62 In the resolution of Hank and Larry, Crowley indicates the possibility of a stable relationship as well as the fact that the rules cannot be the same as they are for "faithful" heterosexuals: "Respect-for each other's freedom. With no need to lie or pretend."63 A relationship, not yet recognized as "a civil union," let alone marriage, has been carved out, and Larry and Hank truly succeed in leaving "the neurotic game-playing" behind.64 This surely implies a transformation of "orientation" as "direc- tion" into "identity." 57 Clum, Acting Gq;, 255. 58 Ibid., 253. 59 Ibid. 60 Ibid., 233. 61 Ibid., 253-54. 62 I bid., 257. 63 Crowley, The Bqys in the Band, 524. 64 Clum, A cting Gqy, 258. 42 SENGUPTA Reminiscent of Crowley's Bqys, On a Muggy Night in Mumbai is the first Indian play to deal with the themes of love, partnership, trust, and betrayal- all within a group of suffering gays, some of whom have left their families while others are living a double life. The "pre-Stonewall" attitude toward lesbians and gays still somewhat prevailed in India when Muggy Night was first performed. Legally, homosexuality has been a taboo in India ever since the drafting by Lord Macaulay of Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code in 1883 that prescribes severe punishment for same- sex "crimes." But it is more or less accepted today that same-sex sex has always been present in "Indian culture" and was more condemned as a sin than punished as a crime in pre-modern times. Much of ancient Sanskrit writing bears proof. References to same-sex relationships figure in the sixth-century Kamasutra, which projects sex as more than as a means to procreation. The Western term "homosexual" is predated in India by a variety of words in different languages, such as "chapti" in medieval Urdu poetry and "swayamvara sakhi" in the eleventh-century Kathasaritsagara for "lesbian" relationships.65 Again, male poets of the medieval school of Bhakti literature, called Madhuri Bhakti, envisaged themselves as women in love with a male god. Indian (Hindu) myths and legends also celebrate love between man and man. It is believed that Lords Vishnu and Shiva in the form of Mohini coupled after the amrit manthan (churning of the oceans) to give birth to god-child Ayyappa. In the temple of Thanjavur, two (male) priests still "ritually enact the copu- lation of the male gods, one cross-dressed as female."66 The depiction of "non-procreative and non-heterosexual" practices in ancient I-:lindu architecture, as Bose and Bhattacharya maintain, further questions "the assumption of the [present] 'norm' as a given."67 The disjunction in "Indian" attitude toward sex/ sexuality may be said to have come with colonial intervention, rather than with the advent of Islam. As Manu rec- ommended only ritual purification for the man indulging in "unnatural" sex and even exempted the sudras (the low-born) from any form of pun- ishment, Zia ud-din Barni declared in his Fatawa-yiJahandari that while "all male prostitutes ... adorning themselves like women ... should be treat- 6 5 Ruth Vanita and Saleem K.idwai, eds., Same Sex Love in India: Readings from Literature and History (New York: Palgra\'e Macmillan, 2001), xxi. 66 Hoshang Merchant, ed., Introduction, Yaraana: Gqy Writingjrom India (New Delhi: Penguin Books India, 1999), xvii-xvili. 6? Brinda Bose and Subhabrata Bhattacharya, eds., Introduction, The Phobic and the Erotic: The Politics of Sexualities in Contemporary India (Calcutta: Seagull Books, 2007), xii. "COMING OlJf OF THE CLOSET" 43 ed with harshness," "habitual sinners" indulging in their practices "in secret" might be spared "severe investigations about their activities."68 The minor strain of homophobia in pre-modern India became predom- inant under British rule-thanks to the modern nation-state's imperative to impose uniformity in most spheres of life, including sexual matters viewed from the Christian perspective. The nationalist/ anticolonial dis- course interestingly became complicit with the colonial technology of power in the othering of gendered and sexual minorities. In the negotia- tion of power, "India" became "a site of anxiety" to the nationalists as the dissident sexual subject threatened the "ideological apparatus" of the "national imagination" that was constituted by the binary of woman as mother-nation with a virile man. Homosexual males were automatically defined as "passive, penetrated, effeminate ... men,"69 unworthy as (free- dom) fighters. "[T]he ongoing construction of the alternatively sexual- ized subject in contemporary India," Bose and Bhattacharya add, is "framed within two overarching contexts": the current politics of the Hindu Right and globalization in terms of media images of LGBTQs.7 On the one hand, the sexually deviant may have to get married (to the opposite sex!) under societal pressure or even commit suicide due to mental torture. On the other, they are bold enough to view themselves as part of a global gay identity so to garner greater visibility and solidarity. Asian/Indian arrangements of (alternative) sexuality, whether or not they allow for richer diversity than their Western counterparts, have different nomenclature based on socio-cultural specificities and older forms of sexual behavior that now coexist with "imported" identities. Prevalent is also the trend, as exemplified by the term MSM, to act out the frequent disconnection between identity and desire, sexual orientation and behav- ior.71 The gay demand for the right to same-sex marriage, however, in India or elsewhere, entails defmitions of desire and conduct. The story of Muggy Night in Mumbai unfolds in the living room of Kamlesh, an affluent Mumbai-based fashion designer, and reaches its climax with the shocking revelation that Prakash, Kamlesh's former love, 68 Zia ud-clin Barni, quoted in Sibaji Bandyopadhyay, the Present: The Pretext: The Fire ControYersy," in The Phobic and the Erotic, 23-24. Emphasis mme. 69 Bose and Bhattacharya, The Phobic and the Erotic, xvii. 70 Ibid., xviii. 71 MSM-or Men (who have) Sex (with) Men-is a resistant label coined by gay activists in India to underscore their culturally different sexual identiry. 44 SENGUPTA is about to marry his sister Kiran. By the end of the play, the anguished Kamlesh exploits others, while Prakash (known as Ed to Kiran) whose past relationship with Kamlesh now stands exposed to her, becomes a victim of his sexual uncertainties that are ascribable to socially prescribed forms of sexual behavior. The play deals with both essentialist and constructionist under- standings of homosexuality in all their complexity. Kamlesh has left his family, seeking to realize his "authentic" gay self which is, for him, a human essence repressed by dominant heterosexual culture. Kamlesh is a "real" gay-a man desiring another man. This trope of gender sepa- ratism, which figures "same-sex desire as the ultimate expression of a person's identification with her or his own gender," 72 challenges the very old but still common distinction between desire and identification, but retains the hetero/homo divide in favor of the "authenticity" or "natu- ralness" of same-sex desire. I t operates within the relations of gender dif- ference but is a distinct form of sexuality. Kamlesh does not accept his psychiatrist's "aversion therapy" because he does not think that he can sexually "reorient" himself and be happy.73 The heterosexual logic that identification and desire be mutually exclusive, as Judith Butler observes, is "one of the most reductive of heterosexism's psychological instru- ments."74 In the 1960s, psychiatry was attacked for being a form of social policing which, with the aid of pseudo-scientific categories, mystified socially desirable behavior as natural, and undesirable behavior as abnor- mal psychosexual development. R. D. Laing, preoccupied with the idea of authentic self or repressed human essence, wrote in The Divided Seifthat psychiatry is a kind of brainwashing to create in all a "normal" "adjust- ed" state that encourages them to acquire "a false self" so as to adapt to the "false realities."7S For homosexuals, heterosexuality is that "false real- ity;" and homosexuality, in this view, is a different substantive/ authentic category which is dismissed as unnatural on the grounds that it does not conform to norms. Deepali, on the other hand, is a woman-identified-woman who functions as a metaphor for an identity entirely different from the male 72 Biddy Martin, "Sexual Practice and Changing Lesbian Identities," in Dutabilizillg Theory, edited by Michele Barrett and Anne Phillips (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1992), 101. 73 Dattani, 011 a Muggy Night i11 Mumbai, in Collected Plqys, 69. 7 4 Judith Butler, "Critically Queer," in Wolfreys, Literary Theories, 583. 75 R. D. Laing, The Divided Seif(Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1965), 12. "COMING OUT OF THE CLOSET'' 45 economy of power. But she is not uncaring toward her family relations, as is a common prejudice of the hereto-patriarchal Indian family about its gay member. For instance, she has come to see her friend in trouble, leaving her two-year-old niece "in the inexperienced hands"76 of her "sig- nificant other," 77 and keeps giving Tina instructions over the phone about babysitting. For Deepali, lesbianism disrupts male power as well as gen- uine bonding, often sexual, between women. When Sharad "complains" that Kamlesh exploited the guard as "a sex object," Deepali "supports" Kamlesh: "Treat him like a sex object. Men should get a dose of their own medicine!"78 She is proud to be a woman and says sarcastically that "men deserve only men." 79 Like lesbian feminists of the seventies, she seems to claim that lesbianism has nothing to do with a medical or bio- logically "essential" condition, but that it is, in fact, a choice available to all women-a choice that any woman aware of the oppressive nature of hetero-patriarchy should make. But her need to fix lesbian identity as a stable and coherent category for gaining visibility eventually gives rise to an essentialist view of lesbianism. Her aim is to forge a new culture based on women's values, and the result in such a case is the ultimate belief in an essential female nature and sexuality. Deepali believes that women are better than men, thus presenting her radicalism as more universalizing than socially grounded and maintaining the fundamental significance of gender differentiation. The character of Sharad, who complains that he wasted a year of his life living with Kamlesh as his "housewife" and trying to make him forget Prakash, ultimately provides a critique of both of the above posi- tions on the relationship between sexuality and gender. He plays multiple gender roles-queen, gay machismo, and straight-thus displacing bio- logically as well as culturally "f1Xed" identity categories. More often than not, he is camp, yet perhaps more than that. While Kamlesh and Deepali stress their separate gay and lesbian identities, imagining for themselves a kind of "purity" or "exclusivity," though in diametrically opposite ways, Sharad plays, if only in stylized speech and gesture, with differences to undermine the very notion of identity. Kamlesh and Deepali emphasize sexual difference as it is applicable to males and females respectively: 76 Dattani, Muggy Night, 64. 77 Ibid., 58. 7 8 Ibid., 63. 79 Ibid., 60. 46 SENGUPTA theirs is a sort of acceptance of identity, only altered by sexual difference. But Sharad privileges sexuality over gender. His parodic roles are perfor- mative strategies that are used to overplay the codes of gender and there- by present identity in its most subversive and denaturalized forms. He is a "housewife," a "drama queen," a glamour girl of the silver screen, a "male bitch." Deepali warns him not to insult the female. But his imita- tion (gender inversion) is more than an insult to women-because it problematizes femininity as traditionally understood. On the other hand, when he plays a macho, his pelvis in an obscene ... fashion," his imitation is more than an aping of masculinity because it destabilizes our understanding of the masculine as the other half of the spectrum of nor- mative heterosexuality.80 Most interestingly, by simultaneously playing both camp and machismo, "virtual alternatives in fact,"8t and parodying both feminine and masculine gender, he exposes gender itself as a fiction. As this contests heterosexual norms and with it the sanctity of marriage that is the base of the traditional family (here one cannot miss Sharad's mockery of the "wedding ceremony" on the compound of K.amlesh's apartment), it also questions an essential/unitary gay desire. It presents desire as something culturally relative which cuts across gender. From this queer perspective, Deepali's investments in "the sta- bility, internal coherence, and uniqueness of lesbian identity" may obscure sexual differences between lesbians, as Martin would have it, and generate a "resistance to knowing" what one fantasizes, desires, and thinks.sz On the other hand, K.amlesh's idea of male homosexuality as a stable category may itself be a cultural construct and appear inadequate for leveling out differences between culturally specific or legally and reli- giously encoded identities within the male gay culture itself. His fantasy of marrying Deepali if she were a man or if he were a woman also fore- grounds the instability of identity which can be further split and changed by unpredictable fantasies, giving rise to newer (and equally temporary) identities. Lastly, is Prakash's change of attitude, his conviction that he has to marry a woman, caused by the pressure of a heterosexual society or just a matter of choice? One possible explanation, in the words of Eve Sedgwick, again could be that sexual desire is a powerful solvent of sta- ble identities-apparently homosexual people may be marked by hetero- 80 Ibid., 101. 81 Dollimore, "Post/ modern," 563. 82 Martin, "Sexual Practice and Changing Lesbian Identities," 97. C o ~ U N G OUT OF THE CLOSET'' 47 sexual fantasies and practices, and vice versa for apparently heterosexual ones.83 But the psychic and embodied consequences of such fantasies are real. Imagining or engaging in different sexual practices takes on differ- ent senses of the embodied self. Later Prakash wants to be known as a straight in order to partake of the privileges of power unavailable to the homosexual. And if he is a bisexual, his suffering at the play's end is due to his confusion over his identity in a society where heteros elide homos, and homos elide bis. It is also important to note that most Indian male homosexuals (of any religio-cultural communities) get married (to women) under "societal pressures" and try to "adjust to a double [sex] life."B 4 Bunny is a classic example in this respect. Apparently, he finds nothing wrong with such "camouflage": "Even animals do it. Blend with the surroundings. They can't find you."BS Significantly, Bunny plays the ideal husband and father in a television serial titled Yeh Hai Hamara Parivaar (This is Our FamilY). But the tragedy is that the only people who know him truly-that is, his friends-hate him for his duplicity. By try- ing to exist in two worlds dishonestly, he seems to exist in neither. Muggy Night shows how heterosexuality has always dismissed homosexuality as "unnatural," claiming itself as the original matrix by which to measure all sexual perversity. The early modern transvestite's transgression was regarded as social rather than sexual- but with para- noia, since he was regarded as "upsetting the entire social domain," even when his "sexual 'orientation' was not the issue."86 The modern concep- tualization/ construction of the sexual deviant as an identity, a patholog- ical sexual subjectivity, has had its own dangers. To have sexuality as a medical and medicalizable object, as Foucault argues in "The Repressive Hypothesis," is also to detect in it a "lesion" or "dysfunction" "in the depths of the organism" itself.B 7 This version of difference as dysfunc- tion betrays the coercive effort to expel from reality the form(s) of sex- uality "not amenable to the ... Qogic] of reproduction."BB This, in turn, 83 Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Epistemology of the Closet (Berkley, CA: University of California Press, 1990), 85. 84 l'vferchant, "Introduction," xvi. 85 Dattani, Muggy Night, 70. 86 Dollimore, "Post/modern," 564. 8 7 Michel Foucault, "The Repressive Hypothesis," in The Foucault Reader, edited by Paul Rabinow (London: Penguin, 1984), 323. ss Ibid., 316. 48 SENGUPTA reduces gender to sex to reproduction, creating homophobia which oper- ates through the naturalization of sexual and gender norms, through the attribution of a damaged or abject identity to the homosexual. The resentment of the people, gathered for the wedding outside, at their acci- dental discovery of Kamlesh's past relationship with Prakash dramatizes it all. Sexuality in its normative forms constitutes a "truth" connecting inextricably "with other truths and norms not explicitly sexual."B9 This is a major reason why sexual deviance is found threatening. "[I]n deviating from normative truth and the 'nature' which underpins it," Dollimore continues, such deviance confuses and troubles "the norms of truth and being throughout culture." 9 0 The fear is that running foul of the law in sexual life may be a stimulus to rebellion in every other discursive field. Deviants may not always be "confronted with direct, coercive efforts to control" what they "do in bed," but they are constantly "threatened with erasure" from social fields where the "naturalizing" process "works to obliterate actual pluralities."91 Muggy Night also destabilizes the culturally "fixed" categories of sexual identities and addresses the ways in which they may be performed, transgressed and even queered. The character of Kamalesh, as noted ear- lier, problematizes the notion of an essential/unitary gay sensibility by suggesting that in the gay male's involvement with masculinity one is like- ly to encounter the simultaneous "identification with, desire for, and par- odies of masculinity."92 Sharad, on the other hand, shows that gay machismo not only apes "the masculinity oppressive of women ... and gays" alike, to borrow phrases from Richard Dyer, but does "much mis- chief" to the security and power of "men" by eroticizing the traditional signs of masculinity "in a blatantly homosexual context."93 Conversely, the camp gay's parody of femininity is both a way of "giving vent to the hostility toward women," to put it in Leo Bersani's words, and a way of "helping to deconstruct that image for women themselves."94 It is neither "degrading to women nor an uncritical appropriation of sex-role stereo- 89 Dollimore, "Post/modern," 554. 90 Ibid. 91 Martin, "Sexual Practice and Changing Lesbian Identities," 95. 92 Dollimore, "Post/modern," 565. 93 Leo Bersani, qtd. in Dollimore, "Post/ modern," 563. 94 Ibid., 565. "COMING OUT OF THE CLOSET" 49 typing." Rather, in imitating gender it reveals "the imitative structure of gender itself."95 Heterosexuality, like the gender divisions on which it relies, "is constituted through repetitive signifying practices that strive, but ... fail, to replicate fantasized ideals of masculinity, femininity, and normal sexuality."% In the process, heterosexuality must "ward off the excesses" (unruly sexual fantasies and desires), as Martin argues, "that emerge in the intervals of repeated performances, excesses that it may then hypostatize in an Other, the homosexual."97 Dattani's play is more radical in its treatment of gender and sex- uality than Mart Crowley's. There are self-hating, morbid gay males in Muggy Night, too. Stung by the failure of his relationship with Kamlesh as well as with I<.iran, Ed contemplates suicide and then hits out at Kamlesh as his suicidal attempt is foiled by his friends. Yet the play puts the sexu- ally deviant in a new light, problematizing apparently stable same-sex identities. Dramatizing the complex dynamics of the relationship between sexuality and gender, desire and identification, Muggy Night in Mumbai and The Bqys in the Band were the first Indian and American plays respectively to insist on acceptance by a heterosexual society of the sex- ual deviant on equal terms, with a view to minimizing the antagonism between the still valid identity categories. Significantly, the Delhi High Court has, in a recent ruling, decriminalized same-sex sex, much to the applaud of the gay rights activists in India, and the Union Cabinet is now waiting for the Supreme Court to take the final stand on the issue. With the Democrats coming to power in the US in 2009, on the other hand, the whole world looks to America for further developments in gay rights. Meanwhile, proper appreciation of the two plays, with their subtexts and contexts, should ensure their historic importance. 95 Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York, London: Routledge, 1990), 137. 96 Martin, "Sexual Practice and Changing Lesbian Identities," 103. 97 Ibid., 103-04. jOURl"lAL OF AMERJCAN DRAMA AND THEATRE 22, NO. 1 (WINTER 2010) AESTHETICS, IDEOLOGY, AND THE USE OF THE VICTIM IN EARLY AMERICAN MELODRAMA Douglas A. Jones, Jr. I began th.is investigation of melodrama with the conceit that there must be someth.ing significant about the form; not only was it the most popu- lar theatrical form among nineteenth-century trans-Atlantic audiences, but also the considerable, at times blithe, disregard for the form among contemporary scholars signifies that it must be really, reai!J important.! This relative scholarly neglect for melodrama is reflected in the negative connotations we associate with the term and its adjectival derivative "melodramatic." They are pejoratives, derisive descriptors that at best sig- nify harmless theatrics and at worst grating h.istrionics. Th.is range of sig- nification underlies the fact that that which we call "melodramatic" is hardly ever consequential. And therein lies its irony: although we now deem over-emotional, over-sensational frivolity "melodramatic," the aes- thetics of nineteenth-century melodrama were hardly trivial. The form thrived on serious business: brave heroes battling to save their civiliza- tions from imperious villains, virtuous individuals staving off corruption and vice, and righteous victims sacrificed for the good of mankind. What, then, to make of melodrama's historical sh.ift from the weighty to the weightless?2 (It is not enough to say that contemporary conceptions 1 Since the 1980s, historians of theatre and culture started to turn to melodra- ma more readily in order to inquire into the nature of early American audiences and, more generally, American culture in its nascence. I believe that there are two primary reasons for this development. First, the publication of Peter Brooks' 1976 The Melodramatic Imagination: Balzac, Hmry James, and the Mode if Excess (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1976) seemed to legitimize melodrama as an appropriate object of inquiry for literary scholars and theorists; Brooks argued that melodrama constituted a cultural mode of "excess" and that that mode structured modern sensibility. Furthermore, the develop- ment of a Nco-Marxist narrative and historiographic paradigm among theatre historians led to the examination of these plays, their performances, and their productions as sug- gestive of an ever-codifying class stratification in Antebellum America. Some notable examples in this historiography are: Bruce McConachie, Melodramatic Formations: American Theatre and Socie!J, 1820-1870 (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1992); Jeffrey D. Mason, Melodrama and the Myth if America (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993); and I'vlichael Hays and Anastasia Nikolopoulou, eds., Melodrama: The Cultural Emergence if Genre (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1996). Notwithstanding the publication of these and other texts, there remains an egregious lacuna in the critical and historical literature on melodrama. 2 I do not want to give the impression that all spectators of melodrama in the 52 jONES of melodrama and the melodramatic are simply linguistic ones. Very few playwrights today would, without irony, classify their works as melodra- ma. In this case, there is a relationship among the formal, the linguistic, and history.) It seems that the aesthetic and theory of melodrama are his- torically grounded in a conception of the socio-existential that is histori- cally hermetic, a spatia-temporal sealing with no interest in the past- or future-infinite. (IX!e are part of that future-infinite and thus these nine- teenth-century plays seem to have very little to offer us.) That is, the pro- duction of melodrama and melodramatic texts was overdetermined by philosophical and ideological formulations that were explicitly immediate to the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and unrepentantly histo- rio-material in their construction: melodrama of the first-half of the nineteenth-century flaunts its connection to eighteenth-century senti- mentalism and a mercantilist-bourgeois ethic, as it attempts to reconcile the relative contradictions between the two in its aesthetic.3 In this way, melodrama is akin to comedy in that both genres "function explicitly as social documents," "insist on being understood in the concrete and par- ticular," and "present us with a socialized ethic." 4 And yet melodramas are not comedies; they frequently do not tend toward unity, wholeness, or reconciliation. In fact, many playwrights of melodrama called their works tragedies, and there are ways in which melodramatic action corresponds to that of tragedy: there is great pathos and suffering; immolated protagonists betoken a crack in the social, moral, and cosmological order; and the form often offers an "individual- ized metaphysic."S The notion of an "individualized metaphysic" coun- antebellum era espoused the form and thought it serious. The critics, for instance, inveighed against "the childish geegaws [sic] yclep'd Melo-dramas." Robert Ewing, Theatrical Contributions of 'Jacques" to the ''United States Gazette" (1826) quoted in David Grimsted, Melodrama Unveiled: Amencan Theatre and Culture, 1800-1850 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1968), 41. By the 1840s, though, even the critics could no longer deny the popularity of melodrama among audiences, as they recognized their inability to refashion public opinion and theatre practices, and thus accepted what Grimsted calls "theatrical democracy" (44). 3 By aesthetic I refer not only to melodrama's formal structures, but also, fol- lowing the lead of German idealists of the mid-eighteenth century, to the bocfy and its sen- ses. See Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten, Aesthetica (1750; reprint, Hildesheim: G. Olms, 1961 ); Immanuel Kant, Critique of judgment, translated by Werner S. Pluhar (1790; reprint, Indianapolis.: Hackett Publishing, 1987); and G. W F. Hegel, The Phi/osopf?y of Fine Art, translated by Francis P. Osmaston (1820-1829; reprint, London: G. Bell Sons, 1920). 4 Alice Rayner, Comic Persuasion: MoralS truct11re in British Comeqy from Shakespeare to Stoppard (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987), 7-11. 5 Ibid., 11. AE.STJIE"fiCS, IDEOLOGY, AND THE USE OF THE VJCfiM 53 terposed with "socialized ethic" is one of the generic formulas that Alice Rayner suggests differentiates tragedy from comedy. Yet I am suggesting melodrama contains both elements. There is, therefore, a fundamental ten- sion within the structure of melodrama that creates a sort of "muddied" form, an aesthetic "impurity" that blatantly draws from both comedy and tragedy in order to produce its desired affect on the spectator. Yet that saturation of form partly explains melodrama's fragility in relation to his- tory: as drama, it attempts to do too much, to accomplish too many things at once. (fhere is a certain metaphysical conceptualization in Shakespeare's Hamlet, for instance, that keeps us going back to the play as it constitutes an understanding of something of the human condition that goes beyond the time-space of Shakespeare's England; whereas the social critique embedded in a comedy such as Jonson's The Alchemist pres- ents us with a particular socio-historical document in which the material- ity of Jonson's idealism, articulated especially in the speeches of Sir Epicure Mammon, functions as a sort of hyper-register of the dialects of physical pleasure in early seventeenth century England. Melodrama qua drama too often dips in both genres' cans: at once, it strives towards the depiction of the particular and the metaphysical, the historical and the transhistorical.) Thus, melodrama's inability to stand the test of time- the aforementioned historical shift from the most consumed form of Romanticism in the nineteenth-century to insult-is not only the result of its own historicity and shifted historio-material groundings, but also of its mutually contradictive, compressive, and tensional structural forma- tions.6 That melodrama borrows equally from comedy and tragedy- most specifically sentimental comedy and bourgeois tragedy (this bor- rowing of genre is part of what I call the pragmatics o/ melodrama, a by-any- means-necessary move of melodrama to accomplish what it wants: an excess of emotionality)-signals one of its most profound contradic- tions. But when we inquire further, we notice melodrama is marked by multiple variances. The texts of early US melodrama, for instance, bla- tantly contest the historical actualities of antebellum society. As African Americans, Native American, and the poor were beaten to the margins of society, they were sometimes the heroes, heroines, and exemplars of virtue within the theatrical frame. Their efforts on the melodramatic 6 Of course, the formal structures of melodrama continue to fashion all sorts of artistic undertakings. From bestselling novels, to soap opera, to Academy Award-win- ning films, the melodramatic strand undergirds much of contemporary popular culture, even if it is not called "melodrama." 54 jONES stage were celebrated, lauded, and pitied; it seemed as if playwrights and theatre-producers were at times in the business of constructing models of resistance and rebellion for these oppressed subjects, giving the impression that their melodramas were oppositional, counter-hegemonic texts. Why, then, would abolitionists such as Frederick Douglass exhort his socio-political allies to stay away from the theatre? I suggest Douglass's and similar minded anti-theatricalists' denunciations of the- atre-going might not have been limited to their moral prejudice against the theatre and/ or the raucousness of its audiences. ("Raucousness" is perhaps too mild a characterization of audiences given their tumultuous and riotous behaviors, from the prurience of the gallery to the unruliness of the pit dominated by a working-class clientele who, particularly during the Age of Jackson and the height of the popularity of heroic melodra- mas, was especially hostile to non-whites.) Douglass and others might also have sensed the fact that melodrama is, as critic Jeffrey H. Richards puts it, "conservative to the core" and thus anathema to their political interests.? I ts reactionary center is composed of a structural dynamism that, as this essay will attempt to show, has to choose a victim whose sac- rifice strives to impel emotional and psychic "discharge" among specta- tors, a discharge that is not necessarily one of amelioration, but rather, as Freud put it, "a heightening of ... energetic [emotional] cathexis."B In early America, the most downtrodden subjects-such as African Americans, Native Americans, and the poor-would make the best vic- tims for melodrama because their immolation proved to be the most pitiable. In Aristotelian terms, although a spectator did not necessarily have to fear enduring a plight similar to that of the victim of the action, that spectator's pity was at least redoubled because the sacrificed suffered greatly in life and in death. However, the appearance remains that the producers and con- sumers of early American melodrama were allies of the subaltern. Therein lies the problem: one cannot read these plays-texts, or any for that matter, as autonomous systems of signification in relation to the his- torical. Suffice it to say here that the ostensible radicalism of melodrama is simply an expression of textual "freedom." What melodrama says (its text) is not necessarily what melodrama does (its ideology): it "simply conceals its more fundamental determination by the constituents of its 7 Jeffrey H. Richards, ed., Ear!J American Drama (New York: Penguin Books, 1997), 447. 8 Sigmund Freud, The Ego and the Id (1923), translated by Joan Riviere (New York: W W Norton and Company, 1960), 15. AESTHETICS, IDEOLOGY, AND THE USE OF THE VICTIM 55 ideological matrix."9 A text's "ideological matrix" is, as Terry Eagleton theorizes it, composed of the General Ideology (GI)-"a relatively coherent set of 'discourses' of values, representations, and beliefs"-and the Aesthetic Ideology (AI)- "a signification of the function, meaning, and value of the aesthetic itself within a particular social formation."to There is at times, then, a fundamental contradiction between the activity of melodrama's production (the GI/ AI matrix) and its resultant product (the "free" text). I argue here that this contradiction forms the ideologi- cal crux of early American melodrama and endows the form with its par- ticularly invidious politico-ethics. The contour of any ethical structure is the aftereffect of the form's self-performativity, that is, how it proceeds to enact its own ideo- logical matrix. An examination of the discursivity of that move from GI/ AI to text, from "interiority" to "exteriority," offers the most com- plete picture of the epistemology rf the melodrama; that is, it reveals not only what the forms "thinks," but also how it "thinks." Such an analysis lays bare melodrama's structures, its assumptions, and its theatrical desire, that is, what it seeks to show and what it seeks to render invisible. Through an analysis of melodrama's historical and philosophical fields, this essay explores the form's epistemic, ideological, and hegemonic functions in the new nation and specifically the use-value of African Americans, Natives Americans, and the poor in terms of their inherent worth to the form's production and consumption. The aesthetics of melodrama depend upon communality, collectivity, and the presence of living bodies to produce a sociality of shared sensibility. I follow Jeffrey D. Mason who argues, "The ideological substructure of melodrama is the sentimental vision of humanity, one based on a high regard for emotions, especially sympathy with others, fraught with profound contradictions that became increasingly debilitating as the nineteenth century unfolded."11 Early Americans turned to melodrama in part because communal emotionality has the potential to defer, at least temporarily, the sorts of contradictions and bitter stratifications-class, ideological, and political-that struc- 9 Terry Eagleton, Criticism and Ideology: A Stutfy in Marxist Criticism (1976; reprint, London: Verso Books, 2006), 74. This formulation is not, of course, limited to melodrama. 10 Ibid., 54, 60; It is important to note here that Authorial Ideology (Aul) is also important in the text's productive mechanisms. As I hope to show later in the essay, how- ever, in terms of early US melodrama the insertion of the biographical is negligible because its "variable" significance was in effect "cancelled as a specific factor" in the pro- duction of the text by the "disjoint or conjoint effects" of the Gl/ AI (63). 11 Mason, Melodrama and the Myth of A merica, 12. 56 jONES tured the new nation. 1 2 The conspicuous disparities of wealth and political access belied the promise of a true democracy and Alexis de Tocqueville was perhaps the most perspicacious of contemporaneous observers of this reality. I turn to Tocqueville's writings on the period not only because of his sin- gular ability to recognize these contradictions, but also because of his directive to remark the dynamic interplay between theatre and democ- racy, his implicit assertion that such contradictions would necessarily manifest on the stage. That is to say that Tocqueville compels us to con- sider the ways in which the circumscribed notion of "we" in "We, the People" was reinforced and legitimized by the stage. This sort of theatri- cal legitimation of a white, male order worked to provide a kind of psy- cho-sensorial bracing for those white male subjects to prepare to weath- er the storm of an impending and unrelenting technological and indus- trial-capitalist modernity. And yet, the exteriorization of the conservative melodrama-i.e. the "free" text-was at times too tempting for some radical-leftists in the antebellum era to ignore. Precisely because melodrama triggers emotion- al sensibilities, it has the potential to be used for socio-political opposi- tion and subversion. When this happens, progressive forces appropriate the text's "freedom" for their purposes and, paradoxically, the conserva- tive form seems to double back on itself and, temporarily, becomes counter-hegemonic. Abolitionists, for instance, used the melodramatic theatre and focused on the emotionality of audiences in performances of Uncle Tom} Cabin in 1853 to prove that whites did, in fact, care for slaves. This notion of caring expressed in the aesthetic, abolitionists thought, might at the very least have the capacity to change those who were ambivalent to the cause of abolitionism. Yet it was extremely rare for rad- icals to turn to melodrama. As I hope to show, melodrama's ideological structure is too steeped in a conservative aesthetic in which the specta- tor's job, relying on the form's simplification and clarity of emotion, was completed when he felt for the victim in the playhouse; he did not have to then apply that upset in ways to re-work the general ideology on behalf of the oppressed. 12 This is the case for melodrama both as a literary text and as a performance event. What differentiates the theatre of melodrama from melodramatic texts is the immediacy of the community of spectators versus a community of readers, in terms of the propinquity of physical presence. Moreover, the texts discussed in this essay were intended for performance; they were not studied or leisure texts. AEsTHETICS, IDEOLOGY, AND THE USE OF THE VICTIM 57 Democracy and Theatrocratic Desire By the time Tocqueville published the second volume of his magisterial treatise Democrary in America in 1840, the United States of America was fraught with contradiction. Just a few years prior, for instance, Pennsylvania wrote and ratified (183 7 -1838) a new state Constitution that gave all of her white male citizens the right to vote as pari passu; that right was stripped from those few African Americans males who had hitherto exercised it. Furthermore, black slavery was firmly entrenched in the South; the federal government had recently instituted a policy that man- dated either ethnic cleansing of Native Americans or their subjection to a forced, genocidal removal to the American hinterlands; and the eco- nomic depression that coursed through the land did not bring men and women together to fashion mutually supportive structures, as the predi- cates of participatory democracy and Jacksonianism might seem to sug- gest. These only intensified class stratification, a reality that Tocqueville deemed as "very natural" (reflective of his own aristocratic bias), and doubly propelled "the personal pride of individuals . . . to form some- where an inequality to their own advantage."13 All these realities formed the tragic strains that bound US democracy and signaled the conscious attempts of a fledgling society to define the paradigms of its democracy and the ontology of citizenship: its tragedy, though, rests in the fact that if all men were indeed created equal, then performances of that equality by some men were incumbent upon the (almost ritualistic) sacrifice of other men. From his position as outside observer, as proto-ethnographer, Tocqueville was sensitive to these sorts of contradictions, happenings that shaped the United States' unprecedented and daunting project: mak- ing democracy. Relative to the voluminous treatise, Tocqueville offers very little in Democrar;y in America about American contradictions in terms of the harsh realities for blacks, Native Americans, and the poor. What he does offer at the end of volume 1, however, is a prediction regarding the "present and probable future" of "Indian Tribes" and a bleak obser- vation on the inability of the three races to mix harmoniously. 1 4 We might couple these almost disembodied accounts of racialization and power with the grief-filled confessions Tocqueville reserved for the most inti- mate-and problematic-of confessor-analysts, the Mother. Writing to 13 Alexis de Tocqueville, Democrary in Amenca, volume 2 (1840), translated by Henry Reeve (New York: Bantam Books, 2002), 747. 14 I bid., 385-442. 58 j ONES his mother about the removal of Native Americans from Tennessee, Tocqueville admits that he could not "witness [the scene] without a heavy heart." He tells her that it was "an odd coincidence .. . to witness the expulsion, or perhaps dissolution, of one of the last vestiges of one of ... the most famous American nations." 1 5 Tocgueville witnessed this tragedy first-hand and was moved to sentimentalized pity. The tragic meaning was clear: that if America were to flourish, it would have to feed canni- balistically upon itself with the "dissolution" of the subaltern. I think it is important to insert Tocqueville in this discussion of early American democracy because of his keen recognition of the pro- ductive roles these contradictions played in the realms of the social and the political, as formative moves of the General Ideology (GI). That very recognition, I believe, partly shaped Tocgueville's ambivalence towards American democracy, an ambivalence most succinctly captured in his description of America's move to democracy: "lapsing" (tourne a).16 The term "lapse" denotes a change in position. That change, the etymology of "lapse" suggests, is at best a lateral one; in fact, as in the term "relapse," that movement is often regressive, signaling a fail.t7 Thus, if America was "lapsing into democracy," she was not necessarily, at least as Tocqueville saw it, moving towards a more perfect union. What is noteworthy is that Tocgueville makes this qualification regarding lapsing in the midst of "Some Observations on the Drama Amongst Democratic Nations": When the revolution which subverts the social and political state of an aristocratic people begins to pene- trate into literature, it generally manifests itself in the drama, and it always remains conspicuous there .... If you would judge beforehand of the literature of a peo- ple which is lapsing into democracy, study its dramatic productions. IS 15 Alexis de Tocqueville, Letter to his Mother, 25 December 1831, quoted in George Wilson Pierson, Tocqueville in America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996), 593; and de Tocqueville quoted in, Andre Jardin, Tocqueville: A Biograpf?y, translated by Lydia Davis and Robert Hemingway (New York: Macmillan Books, 1989), 169. Emphasis mine. 16 Alexis de Tocqueville, De Ia dimocralie en Amerique, second volume (1840; Paris: Michel Levy Freres, 1868), 130. 17 I am grateful to Alice Rayner for pointing out the "double-edge" significa- tion of "lapsing." 18 Tocqueville, Democracy in America, 596. A ESTHETICS, IDEOLOGY, AND THE USE OF THE V!CDM 59 It is too difficult for any cultural historian or dramatic critic to ignore this suggestive observation. First, throughout this chapter, Tocqueville-per- haps unwittingly-conflates drama ("literature") and theatre ("dramatic productions"). But this conflation is not as problematic as it might be had he not stressed performance before audiences (les spectateurs). His concern with drama is with the ways receiving publics and their mores shape its liter- ary and theatrical production. For Tocqueville, a drama's worth can only be evaluated in terms of its contribution to the theatrical event: "For, after all, the principal object of a dramatic piece is to be performed, and its chief merit is to affect the audience."19 In this way, Tocqueville is in accordance with those contemporaneous American critics and play- wrights such as Dion Boucicault who believed that "public opinion is the highest and sole court of jurisdiction in literary and artistic matters ... and the drama is, therefore, made by the collaboration of the people and poet." 20 This "collaboration," moreover, situates the playwright between an imagined audience and an actual one. That is, in Tocqueville's study the playwright must anticipate what would please his audience- whether it is an audience of one such as Richelieu in the Court of Louis XIII or audi- ences of many hundred such as those in Antebellum America. The sub- sequent reception of the enacted text would then provide the playwright concerned with public consumption with a sort of register of what "worked" and what did not. But what works is not simply indicative of taste but also of the General Ideology (GI), and how that something works bespeaks of the Aesthetic Ideology (AI). Thus, the "success" of theatre in many ways depends on how well these ideologies are embed- ded within a particular text. Therefore any reading of the texts of early American melodrama is, perhaps paradoxically, at the same time a read- ing of the theatres of melodrama because playwrights at the time were particularly beholden to popular opinion and consumption. Tocqueville implicitly recognized that ideological structures rather than abstracted theories of art (which despite any claims of being transhistorical, are also in determinate ways bound to their particular times and places) dictated what was acceptable to the public: ''You may be sure that if you succeed in bringing your audience into the presence of something that affects them, they will not care by what road you brought them there; and they will never reproach you for having excited 19 Ibid., 599. zo Dion Boucicault, quoted in Richards, E ar!J Amencan Drama, 444. 60 JONES their emotions in spite of dramatic rules." 21 What Tocqueville is talking about is what the ancient Greeks scorned as "theatrocracy." Samuel Weber explains theatrocracy as "the rule of the audience," in which "it appears to respect no . .. limits."22 In the context of melodrama, this lack of limits can be read in part as a formal concern, namely that melodrama equally takes from tragedy and comedy. But that investment in tragedy and com- edy is not arbitrary-it expresses theatrocratic desire. That is to say, a the- atrocracy reflects the power an audience wields in relation to the play- wright: in theatrocracy, pleasing the audience matters most. The playwright's concern, or lack thereof, for the affectation and emotions of his audience is not only a reflection of the artistic or eco- nomic pressures he might feel in relation to his craft, but also of the social system itself. That is to say, societies seem to "choose" between theatre and drama. As Richard Schechner notes: What might be said is that rigid social systems tend to generate events that concentrate on theater and per- formance, on spectacular confirmations of the existing social order within which brackets of play are allowed, while flexible social systems tend toward drama .... The impulse toward collectivity, groupness, identification with others leads toward theater and performance; the impulse toward individuality, personal assertiveness, and confrontation between individuals leads towards drama. 2 3 In the context of early US history, this theory of the relation between society and drama/theatre raises several important questions. If early America tended towards theatre and performance as opposed to drama, as the historical and textual records suggest (it was a theatrocracy), then what can we say about its social system? That is, if Schechner is accurate in this formulation-and I believe he is-then what are we to make of the American articulation of democracy, with its socio-cultural uncon- scious, as a "rigid social system"? Finally, what was it about the new, 21 Tocqueville, Democracy in Amenca, 600. 22 Samuel Weber, Theatricaliry as Medium (New York: Fordham University Press, 2004), 33. 23 Richard Schechner, Peiformance Theory (1988; reprint, London: Routledge, 2003), 102-3. AESTHETICS, IDEOLOGY, AND TilE USE OF THE VICTIM 61 "existing social order" that necessitated confirmation within the theatri- cal frame and in what ways was the "revolution that subvert[ed] the social and political state of an aristocratic people" productive of and operative in its "dramatic productions"? 24 To consider these questions is an attempt to locate the movement of the GI within the State and its apparatuses such as the theatre. (Even spaces of resistance "belong" to the State: resistance is a method of participation.) To that end, I turn to the aes- thetic of the theatre of melodrama and specifically to its philosophical genealogy because such an analysis makes clear the function such an aes- thetic plays in relation to the perpetuation of the State, particularly for a new one that needed (white, male) post-revolutionary reconciliation. The melodramatic theatre- with its participatory dimensions (the emotional- ity, the "oohs" and "ahhs") that were "written into" the texts-was indeed such a site (even if the reconciliation was often transient). For the good of the State, those performative additives worked to foreclose dis- sidence, legitimize its efforts, and foster reconciliation. Philosophy and the Painful Politics of "Healing" The critical literature on the formal history of early American melodra- ma frequently centers on the authorial antecedents of the genre. Critics turn to European playwrights such as August von Kotzebue, Guilbert de Pixerecourt, and Thomas Holcraft because they were instrumental in the development of melodrama in Europe and their plays, often as adapta- tions or translations, were popular among early American audiences.2s Yet these discussions reveal very little in terms of locating the ideological machinery of melodrama; furthermore, they run the risk of establishing a too direct link by suggesting a simple causality from one playwright to the other, a critical move that occludes the ideological and hegemonic dynamism that pervaded not only the drama (and the arts) of the period, but also the social, the political, and the economic. In other words, to focus for example, on the influence of Pixerecourt's fairy-tale melodra- mas on the works of John Howard Payne without an eye to the larger philosophic and episternic formulations of the period would be, in effect, to grant a sort of existential autonomy to both authors that positions 24 Tocqueville, Democracy in America, 596. 2 5 Grimsted, Melodrama Unveiled, 8-16; McConachie, Melodramatic J7ormations, 30- 56; Hays and Nikolopoulou, Melodrama, viii-ix. 62 jONES them outside history.26 As Eagleton notes, the subjectivity of the author, or Authorial Ideology (Aul), "is never to be treated in isolation from GI, but must be studied in its articulation with it ... [because the text] is the product of an aesthetic working of 'general' ideology as that ideology is itself worked and 'produced' by an overdetermination of authorial-biog- raphical factors." 27 What is noteworthy about early American melodrama is that the majority of playwrights were so concerned with popular suc- cess-recall that Boucicault called public opinion "the highest and sole court of jurisdiction in literary and artistic matters"-that any trace of authorial idiosyncrasy within the texts is virtually negligible.zs This over-regard for the public led to several important devel- opments. The most ironic: an awareness that the United States lacked an indigenous national drama. Even though American audiences got what they wanted, their spectatorial desires continued to be fundamentally shaped by European thought. (This is not surprising given the country's newness.) Therefore, they could not produce a "literature of the people," i.e. national drama, because it was not, as the journal North American Review put it, "peculiar."29 This lack of peculiarity is not simply attributa- ble to America's inability to produce an artistic "genius" (a categorization "invented" during the romantic period) but more important, we can also account for the dearth of dramatic singularity and the negligibility of Aul within the texts because the Aul "may be effectively homologous with GI/ AI, or it may be 'cancelled' as a specific factor by their distinct or conjoint effects. In either of these cases, Aul as a particular 'level' effec- tively disappears."3D The disappearance of Aul within melodrama was not only the result of the intensity of the GI/ AI relation, but in the context of early US history, its lack was also the consequence of a new nation making use of the elements of an inherited and jumbled Weltanschauung 26 Bruce McConachie's Melodramatic Formations avoids this sort of authorial cen- tering in relation to the production of a text, as he always considers the functioning (of) ideology; it remains the finest reading of early American melodrama. 27 Eagleton, Criticism and Ideology, 58-59. 28 There are, of course, melodramas that are better written than others. Robert Montgomery Bird, playwright of The Gladiator, was one of the most talented writers in the period and, because of American theatrocracy, turned to the novel because he thought he might utilize more of his authorial talents there. See Grimsted, Melodrama Unveiled, 56-7. 29 North American Review, 19 October 1824. 30 Eagleton, Criticism and Ideology, 63. AESTHETIC$, IDEOLOGY, AND THE USE OF THE V!CriM 63 as it struggled to build its own. My analysis, then, requires a turn to the "triumphant, rationalist, humanist 'Enlightenment' of the eighteenth century" of Western Europe and its critiques because they were the dominant ideologies that shaped the personal, racial, and political formations of early America- forma- tions that would be realized in the textual and theatrical material of the melodrama.31 (An American philosophical tradition does not really begin until the 1840s with Ralph Waldo Emerson and Walt Whitman; a conse- quential philosophic class does not form until later in the century with William James, his students George Santayana and W E. B. Du Bois, and John Dewey.) Post-Reformation and post-Descartes, the rationalist and secular turn in European thought led to the "creation" of the individual, a conceptualization of subjectivity that posited the human as a self- reflexive, self-contained atom who inherently possessed all of the neces- sary faculties with which to produce happiness. According to this formu- lation, man was only a social being in so far as he entered into social "contracts" with others, a sum that was never greater than its individual parts. This atomization of society became the basis of what Hobsbawm calls "classical bourgeois liberalism" and manifest in the political realm as a schism between (belief in) the rule of the majority and that by a prop- ertied elite.32 The beginning of American political history and philosophy tells its own version of this tale, e.g. Jeffersonianism versus Federalism. And while there is no need to rehearse that story here, what is important for my purposes is that both sides ascribed to liberalism insofar as they both promulgated the same definition of natural rights. Natural rights meant, in part, man should be free from the tyranny and coercion of monarchies and aristocracies. In this way, liberalism shared with (pre-Marxian) social- ism a view of the world that would produce a social utilitarianism, that is, the greatest happiness for the greatest number. But socialism differed with liberalism in that socialism views society as organically social, that "society was not a necessary but regrettable diminution of man's unlim- ited natural right to do as he liked, but [rather] the setting of his life, hap- piness, and individuality."33 Regardless of their respective differences, both socialism (happiness qua irreducible molecule) and liberalism (hap- 31 Eric Hobsbawm, The Age of Rvoilltion, 1789-1848 (1962; reprint, New York: Random House, 1996), 234. 32 Ibid., 234-41. 33 Ibid., 243. 64 JONES piness qua irreducible atom) found in conservatism its greatest enemy, an ideological formulation that argued both liberals and socialists were inter- fering in the "natural" course of history. As the conservative and elo- quent Edmund Burke put it in 1791, "It were better to forget, once and for all, the encyclopedie and the whole body of economists, and to revert to those old rules and principles which have hitherto made princes great and nations happy."34 If the teleology of history positioned the few on top and the great many on bottom, whose business was it to intervene in the "natural" order of things? Clearly, the vast majority of Americans did not subscribe to such articulations of conservatism. Yet there was a decided split between those who subscribed to liberalism and its economic derivative capitalism (mostly the emerging and aspiring bourgeoisie) and those who accepted socialism (most often the poor and those who would join phalanxes and utopias); and while that split continues to structure political alliances and sociality, early Americans often found themselves in situations in which they had to interact with their ideological counterparts. Although upper- class elites would start to build "refuges" from the masses in the late 1830s and 1840s such as the Astor Place Opera House (1843), and the reform-minded would turn to polite museum theatres in the 1850s, the- atre-going remained an economically-mixed affair. How, then, could this sociality be harmonious? What might make these social "contracts" bear- able? Where might individuals put aside their ideological differences and stand on common ground? If anything might do it, it would be the the- atre of melodrama-the space where the effusion of emotionality and sentimentality ostensibly strips away all ideology because it leaves its spectators bathed in tears, wrapped in laughs, and engulfed in wonder.JS Why? Because, at least as sentimental philosophy would have it, melo- drama consciously implicates the sentiments, those sensorial, experiential, and universal markers of truth and morality that, following David Hume, "are not only the same in all human creatures, and produce the same approbation or censure; but they also comprehend all human crea- tures."36 34 Edmund Burke, "Letter to Chevalier de Rivarol," 1 June 1791, quoted in ibid., 246. 35 It is not that everything functioned according to plan within the playhouse, that there were not contingencies that shaped the event; what I am after in this essay is the aesthetic theory of the melodrama. 3 6 David Hume, An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals, edited by Tom L. Beauchamp (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 148. AESTHETICS, IDEOLOGY, AND THE USE OF THE VICTIM 65 For Hume and the Anglo moral sense philosophers, the body and its senses are the final arbiters of what is moral, ethical, and true. That is to say, morality is not a "matter of fact," but rather a "feeling."3 7 Hume was deeply skeptical of the ability of a systematic Reason severed from the realm of the mundane to constitute moral and ethical structures for lived experience precisely because such philosophical moves-typi- fied in the period by Immanuel Kant and the German idealists in search of the elusive noumena-shunned the mundane. Hume's inversion of the Cartesian mind/body split-for him it was body/mind-set Anglo philosophy on a course that, for some time, put its greatest stock in the aesthetic. As Eagleton reminds us, the aesthetic concern is not merely a concern with form, the always already permeable enclosure of represen- tation, but also as a philosophical thematic, aesthetics was "born as a dis- course of the body .... [I]t is as though philosophy suddenly wakes up to the fact that there is a dense, swarming territory beyond its own enclave which threatens to fall utterly outside its sway."38 The burgeoning of aes- thetic philosophy and morality in the eighteenth century- prefigured in the previous century in the writings of Baruch Spinoza-marks a critical move in Western philosophy away from the realm of transcendence to that of imminence. That is not to say that philosophies of transcendence disap- peared in the eighteenth century. In Kant, Western philosophy found its most consequential metaphysician since Plato; in fact, part of the project of German idealism was to find a way to subordinate the aesthetic under the umbrella of Reason.39 But their Anglo counterparts to the west reject- ed this hierarchization of transcendence over immanence (Hume explic- 3 7 David Hume, Treatise o/ Human Nature, 1739-1740, edited by L. A. Shelby Bigge (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978), 469. 38 Terry Eagleton, The Ideology o/ the Aesthetic (London: Wiley-Blackwell, 1991 ), 13. 39 Alexander Baumgarten's 1750 Aesthetica initiates the project in the most sig- nificant way. Kant would later inveigh against the subjectivity of "egoistic" taste and argue that taste can never be subjective but is always bound by what Hannah Arendt terms the "nonsubjective element in the nonobjective senses," that is, the social or "intersubjectivi- ty." (Hannah Arendt, Lectures o/ Kant's Political Philosophy, edited by Ronal Beiner [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989], 67; Immanuel Kant, "Critique of Taste" in the Critique of Judgment [1787).) Later in the nineteenth century in his Pbtlosopby of Fine Art, Hegel would give way to the sensations of sight and hearing and suggest that they are the only aesthetic sense worthy of philosophical concern because they elude desire and there- fore are subject to a sort of disembodied analytic. Adam Smith, Theory o/ Moral Sentiments (1759) quoted in British Moralists, being Selections from Writers Principai!J o/ the Eighteenth Century, vol.l, edited by L.A. Shelby-Bigge (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1897), 337. 66 jONES itly inverted it) and were instead led by what Eagleton calls "the law of the heart."40 This aestheticized ethical compass did not only guide the philosophical queries of figures such as Hume and the Earl of Shaftsbury, but it also reached to the realms of politics (in Edmund Burke's conservatism, for instance) and economics (in Adam Smith's for- mulation of capitalism). In fact, Smith's first major work, Theory of Moral Sentiments, provides the most succinct formulation of the interrelations of society, virtue/vice, and the aesthetic/body: Human society, when we contemplate 1t m a certain abstract and philosophical light appears like a great, immense machine .... [S]o virtue, which is, as it were, the fine polish to the wheels of society, necessarily pleases; while vice, like the vile rust, which makes them jar and grate upon one another, is necessarily offen- si\e.41 Thus, if the early Smith were to legitimize the later Smith of The Wealth of Nations, the "invisible hand" of the free market would produce the greatest happiness among the greatest number of people, as the presence of happiness would be self-evident as embodied pleasure. In other words, capitalism would be legitimated by an aestheticized utilitarianism. The United States embraced this portion of their Anglo heritage. Utilitarianism was part and parcel of what they conceived of "democra- cy," with chants democratic ringing out pro bono publico. But also the new nation took to the Humean notion of the aestheticization of truth and socialized ethic. 4 2 This is one of the major reasons why melodrama was especially formative and popular in early America: it functioned as a sort of locus of "truth," where sensibility legitimized ideology. That valoriza- tion gave (at least temporarily) a sense of closure, of finality because the truth-value of an ideology was felt and therefore measured as it coursed through the body and the senses, that is, in the aesthetic. The aesthetics of melodrama work in such a way as to create a space where subjects with different ideologies-e.g. liberalism/socialism; 40 Eagleton, Ideology Aesthetic, 31. 41 Quoted in .ibid., 32-5. 42 Not until the late 1830s did the United States produce as1y sort of conse- quential work on the socio-philosophic thematic of transcendence. It was Ralph Waldo Emerson's foray into Kantian metaphysics and the publication of his essay "Nature" in 1836 that would set in motion the school of American Transcendentalism. AEsTHETICS, IDEOLOGY, AND THE USE OF THE VICrJM 67 rule of the majority/ rule of propertied elite; paternalism/ working-class solidarity-can exist in a sort of sentimental harmony, where they can dwell in something like the neoplatonic One, a conception of an origi- nary unity of man and the good. McConachie offers a compelling read- ing of the ways in which neoplatonism figures in (the ideology of) fairy- tale melodrama within the theatrical frame, and particularly in relation to the tableau: "The tableau, in effect, reveals the neoplatonic moment when materiality rejoins the One, when the multiplicity of intentions and emotions on stage melts into a single image fusing mundane relationships with spiritual grace. The final tableau projects a paternalistic utopia."43 I want to extend his formulation to include the theatre of melodrama in terms of what it seeks to do with its audiences, that is, to envelop them in Oneness. Shared sentimentality as the means to Oneness was the mech- anism by which hierarchies, such as those reflected in ticket prices and seating location as well as ideological differences, would be collapsed. The ideology of the aesthetic (AI) of melodrama, then, is the systemiza- tion of a set of signifying structures by way of sentimental impressions on spectators' bodies that attempts to preclude social, political, ideologi- cal, and personal difference among subjects in order to reveal its own socio-ideological order in markedly absolutist, determinate, and almost mystical terms. The socio-ideological order of melodrama, moreover, is funda- mentally a conservative one. In one sense, melodrama's aestheticization relies on appeals to the General Ideology (GI)-that is to say, on calls to culture, "through a plea for the values and affectations richly implicit in national tradition;" this appeal is perhaps more of an insertion of the GI into melodrama because, like tragedy, it is a "conservative genre, a ready-made vehicle for cultural values."45 The double conservatism of melodrama-in terms of how and what it holds-occludes, ironically, its own conservatism in the sense that its appeal to sensibility works to natu- ralize the enacted (conservative) ideology as though the very ideology itself resides in the aesthetic, in the body, in the One, as Truth. This ideologi- cal hiding, its "naturalization," is its hegemonic vehicle in that it "rul[es] and inform[sJ the senses from within while allowing them to thrive in all of their relative autonomy."46 No wonder then that Burke, the towering 43 McConachie, Melodramatic Formations, 45. 44 Eagleton, Ideology Aesthetic, 26. 45 Rayner, Comic Persuasion, 9. 46 Eagleton, Ideology Aesthetic, 1 7 68 JONES conservative Briton in the period, would write in his An Appeal to the New From the Old Wht;gs: "There is a boundary to men's passions when they act from feelings, none when they are under the influence of imagination."4 7 This structuring constitutes the operational logic of melodrama that not only works to resolve ideological, economic, and social contra- dictions; but such a working also has the capacity to produce its own sort of seeming internal contradiction in terms of the relationship between AI and GI. How to produce the One (AI) when the time of melodrama was the period of State-sanctioned slavery (GI)? What is Oneness in rela- tion to the Trail of Tears? These questions are meant to suggest that a GI founded on a sociality of exclusivity and erasure- the vexed contradic- tions of early US democracy-can never produce a neoplatonic totality. (But what can?) But melodrama anticipates this actuality; its aesthetic compensates for the impossibility of utter totality, it improvises, and seeks to deal with it accordingly. The anticipation of the impossibility of Oneness is part of the pragmatics of melodrama. (Melodrama says: "If I can't have the One-One, I will have one One.") These pragmatics mani- fest themselves in a structural move in which melodrama, in a hermeneu- tic way, chooses a victim as a way to deal with the problem. (What is so effective about this pragmatic gesture is that before the victim is sacri- ficed, [s]he always leaves something with the spectator: a model of virtue, noble [savage] innocence, or humility. In this way, these "mechanisms towards the Good" of the sacrificed are bestowed upon the spectator to help him with the journey back to the white, male One. I deal with this in more detail later in the essay.) On one level, the destruction of the victim satiates a personal desire, as the immolated object produces a sentimentalized, affected sub- ject-spectator. But as Eagleton notes, this association with the object is mosdy an attenuated one and instead produces a certain kind of spectato- rial narcissism: "To be sentimental is to consume less the object itself than one's own feelings for it."48 A sentimentalized attachment to the suffering object is one sustained by an empathetic projection of the subject's self onto the object-Other. This projection most often veils the Other's wounds and can produce a kind of ironic solipsism, an over-investment in the self at the expense of the Other, in which the real wounding of the Other only exists in the imagination of the empathetic spectator. Saidiya Hartman writes about this in her discussion of white spectators witnessing the ter- rors of black slavery and how such a projection stymies political action on 47 Quoted in ibid., 28. 48 Ibid., 40. AESTHETICS, IDEOLOGY, AND THE USE OF THE VICTIM 69 behalf of the abject Other: "'Yet empathy in important respects confounds [the spectator's] efforts to identify with the enslaved because in making the slave's suffering his own, [the spectator] begins to feel for himself rather than for those whom this exercise in imagination presumably is designed to reach."49 As Bertolt Brecht profoundly understood, empathy is a conser- vative gesture that makes men sick with self-love. On another level, the destruction of the victim in melodrama is to make way for a (white, male, homo) social order that the forces of the world outside of the theatrical frame somehow refuse, somehow defer. The destruction operates as an aestheticized ideal of what the GI could do outside the frame of representation if it had its way and did not meet with forms of resistance (such as abolitionism, working-class activism, and social reform movements). The "lesson" of a melodrama such as The Octoroon (1859) is that despite her integrity, generosity, and magnanimity, Zoe has to be sacrificed in order to restore harmony and order. Her abil- ity to traverse the racial divide, both in terms of the epidermis and the cultural, suggests a permeable social order that stands in the way of the journey to the (white, male, homo) social One. In the context of the for- mation of a white supremacist ideology (constitutive of the GI) in early America, Oneness relies on an intensely rigid social order in which "white" means "this" and "black" means "that." These circles of posi- tionality should not bisect or overlap in any way, hence the profusion of literature against social and sexual amalgamation Qater called miscegena- tion) in the antebellum period. The persistence of a society that is built on the institution of black slavery requires the termination of sexual, domestic, and cultural interracial relations. The Octoroon works to reinforce this ideology, but it does so in such a way as to give Zoe (and those like her) her proper due. (Britain, which had abolished slavery two decades prior to the first performance of The Octoroon, saw a very different play: Zoe lives and she and George go off to marry.) The immolation of Zoe (and other characters similar to her such as Uncle Tom and Metamora) offers the (white) spectator: 1) the time and space to release collective emotion; and 2) what I call mechanisms towards the Good. As for the former, right before her death and the final tableau, Zoe says: "No; but I loved you so, I could not bear my fate .... 0! George, you may, without a blush, confess your love for the Octoroon."SO Zoe's appeal to George, that he let the world know of his love for her, is made 49 Saidiya Hartman, Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth Century America (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 19. 50 Dion Boucicault, The Octoroon (1859), in Richards, Ear!J American Drama, 494. 70 jONES possible by her death. Yet the use-value of Zoe's death is not limited to the action contained within the theatrical frame; her death also functions to let loose within the audience the emotional vestiges of unfulfilled desire for the black Other; if blackface minstrelsy was the "cultural marker" or "visible sign" of "cross-racial desire that coupled a nearly insupportable fascination and a self-protective derision with respect to black people," as Eric Lott argues, then the melodramatic stage was a cultural space where white spectators could collectively mourn the impossibility of the co-exis- tence of their "love" for (the idea of) blackness, black culture, and black bodies with the general ideology of whiteness in America.Sl This is what troubles an oppositional text such as William Wells Brown's The Escape; or, a Leap for Freedom (1858), the first published play by an African American. As melodrama, its oppositional edge is fraught because the leap for free- dom is a litera/leap out of America and into Canada. The final tableau: "Glen, Melinda, and Cato jump into the boat, and as it leaves the shore and floats away [to Canada,] Glen and Cato wave their hats, and shout loudly for freedom."52 Even an antislavery play such as The Escape, participates in the aesthetic ideology of melodrama in that it understands, pragmatically, how Oneness in the context of early American's general ideology required the sacrifice of black people. Although Glen, Melinda, and Cato live in The Escape, they are sacrificed in the sense that they have to leave the United States. The play qua melodrama is a text of mourning. But an explicit pleasure tempers grief in this case because Glen, Melinda, and Cato live. Thus, white spectators get to have it both ways in The Escape: black bodies are gotten rid of, but they do not suffer and die in the end: it is sacrifice with a certain kind of moral satisfaction. Furthermore, the grief expressed in response to the immolation of the victim allowed white spectators to participate in a sphere of sen- timentality that legitimates their humanity and the ideology of white supremacy. The project of whiteness has in large part been a project of proving the incontrovertible humanity of white subjects in contradistinc- tion to and at the expense of the racial Other, and nineteenth-century melodrama was one of its most potent cultural devises because it "proved" an important premise of that ideology: the belief that white subjects felt deeper-and thus were more human- than others. In The Octoroon, after the slave Pete tells his fellow slaves that their mistress has 51 Eric Lott, Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrel.[y and the American Working Class (Oxford: Oxford University, Press, 1993), 6. 52 William Wells Brown, The Escape; or, A Leap for Freedom (1858), edited by John Ernest (Knoxville: University of Tennessee, 2001), 47. AESTHSnCS, lDEOWGY, AND THE USE OF THE VJCnM 71 to sell them in order to pay off debts and liens on her plantation, he makes an implicit valorization of race, humanity, and sentiment: "Come along; she har what we say, and she's cryin' for us. None o' ye ign'rant nig- gers could cry for yerselves like dat."S3 In other words, blacks were infe- rior to whites even in terms of grasping the magnitude of the trauma of their own separation and sale because they could not produce the appro- priately sensible reaction. Pete makes the same equivalence of thinking, feeling, and humanity that Thomas Jefferson makes in his Notes on the State if Virginia. In response to the question of whether or not to "retain and incorporate blacks into the state," Jefferson cites objections such as "deep-rooted prejudices entertained by the whites," but he also suggests a relationship between the physiological, the sentiments, humanity, and citizenship. He writes: To these objections, which are political, may be added others, which are physical and moral. The first difference which strikes us is that of color. Whether the black of the negro resides in the reticular membrane between the skin and scarf-skin, or in the scarf-skin itself; whether it proceeds from the color of the blood, the color of the bile, or from that of some other secretion, the difference is fixed in nature, and is real as if its seat and cause were better known to us. And is this difference of no impor- tance? Is it not the foundation of a greater or less share of beauty in the two races? Are not the fine mixtures of red and white, the expressions of every passion by greater or less suffusions of color in the one, preferable to that eternal monotony which reigns in the counte- nances, that immovable veil of black which covers all the emotions of the other races? ... I advance it therefore as a suspicion only, that the blacks, whether originally a dis- tinct race, or made distinct by time and circumstances, are inferior to the whites in the endowments of both body and mind . . .. [fhe] unfortunate difference of color, and perhaps of faculty, is a powerful obstacle to the emancipation of these people.S4 53 Boucicault, The Octoroon, 478. 54 Thomas Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia (1787), in Defending Slavery: Pros/avery Thought in the Old South, edited by Paul Finkelman (Boston: Bedford/St. Martin's Press, 2003), 49-54. 72 jONES Implied in Jefferson's pro slavery defense is his belief in the incontrovert- ible humanity (and therefore freedom) of whites because of the physio- logical capacity of white skin to stage emotion (blushing). The theatre of melodrama gave white sentimental spectators the ability to affirm their humanity (and freedom) in heightened and concentrated form. And because this affirmation was located in the senses, in the aesthetic, every member of the audience was equipped to participate. The melodramatic action of Uncle o m ~ Cabin in an 1853 production at the National Theatre in New York City, for instance, compelled the rowdy Bowery B'hoys of the pit to fall ".into deep silence," the johns and harlots of the gallery to be "bathed in tears and oblivious to all baser purposes," and even the fiercely anti-theatrical Harriet Beecher Stowe who observed from her elite box-seat "scarcely spoke during the evening; but her expression was eloquent-smiles and tears succeeding each other through the whole."SS In short, melodrama allowed white spectators from all walks of life to share .in the oneness of emotionality. But the sacrifice of the victim-Other not only provided a space where white spectators could aesthetically affirm their humanity. As I suggest above, the pragmatics of melodrama also grant the immolated victim certain traits-mechanisms towards the Good, I call them-to pass on to spectators who then might take them on outside the play- house. By mechanisms towards the Good, I mean the sorts of qualities that, in discussions of melodrama or sentimental comedy, are subsumed under the rubric of virtue-honesty, generosity, loyalty, sincerity, piety, and, in early America, patriotism. But I also mean the types of qualities that would, according to anti-bourgeois ideology, return man to his "nat- ural," pre-Industrial Revolution state, namely, primitivism. Primitivism, from Rousseau through the Romantic epoch, meant a society composed of men of feeling, of men uncorrupted by "civilization" and technol- ogy; it was imagined as "a sort of model for utopia" because men were free of capitalist competition and technology, and thus were not alienat- ed from each other and the world. 56 For these thinkers, primitivism was 55 "'Uncle Tom' Among the Bowery Boys," New York Dai!J Times, 27 July 1853; "The Drama of 'Uncle Tom's Cabin,"' The National Era, 25 August 1853, quoted in A.M. Drummond and Richard Moody, "The Hit of the Century: Uncle Tom's Cabin: 1852-1952," Educational Theatre Journal 4 (December 1952): 158. I should note that some theatres, such as A. H. Purdy's in New York City when it offered Uncle Tom's Cabin, would sometimes allow free and slave African Americans to attend. In those cases, however, it did not impact the aesthetic ideology of the theatre of melodrama that I am after in this essay. 56 Hobsbawm, The Age of Revolution, 267. AESTHETICS, IDEOLOGY, AND THE USE OF THE VJC!1M 73 the ideal state of being because in it man was his most natural, most sen- sible, and most innocent, that is, his most human. Moral sense philosophy posits that sensibility is not secondary to Reason, but rather (at the very least) an equal part of the same epistemological apparatus. Thus, and to couple this formulation with Platonic terms, primitive man is closest to the Form of the Good-the space whence enlightenment and knowl- edge spring forth-because he is closest to his heart. No other literary or theatrical figure of antebellum America was more representative of the blessings of primitivism than the free, noble savage, that is, the Native American hero. Yet this condition was wholly figural: Native Americans were forced to undergo a systematic genocide sponsored by the federal government. While "savage" "nobility" figured on the melodramatic stage and in the Leatherstocking novels of James Fenimore Cooper, state and local governments in the South found no use for Native Americans-noble, savage, or otherwise-and successfully lobbied for the passage of the Indian Removal Act of 1830. In actuality, little was known about Native American life and the "noble savage" was largely a theoretical construct. Theory or not, the "stage Indian" was one of the most popular character-types throughout the antebellum period. As Americans were overwhelmed by what some saw as the dehumanizing ideology and tech- nology of the Industrial Revolution, they took comfort in the fact that one could always turn to the noble savage for a model of innocence and purity, a model (back) towards the Good. James Nelson Barker's The Indian Princess (1808), the earliest, extant play to stage Native Americans, tells the story of Pocahontas and celebrates the type of instinctual and emotional knowledge that became characteristic of the noble savage, knowledge that was at times deemed more useful to certain forms of rationalistic and technological Reasoning. After Captain John Smith has been captured, the Chief of the Powhatan tribe decides to execute Smith. Nantaquas, son of Powhatan, tries to reason with his father as a means to save Smith: ''Warriors, listen to my words; listen, my father, while your son tells the deeds of the brave white man .... Hearken my father, to my true words! ... His Icing is like you, my father, good and great; and he comes from a land beyond the wide water, to make us wise and happy."S7 Yet his words are fruitless; it takes the visceral and tearful attempt of Pocahontas to save Smith. Barker writes in a stage direction: "Music. The third signal is struck, the hatchets are lifted up: when the Princess, shrieking, runs dis- 5 7 James Nelson Barker, The Indian Ptincess (1808), in Richards, Ear!J American Drama, 132-3. 74 jONES tracted!J to the block, and presses Smith's head to her bosom." She then says: "My father, dost thou love thy daughter? Listen to her voice: look upon her tears: they ask for mercy to the captive." 58 Here, the sentimental appeal is the most effective because it reads as the most truthful. But unlike Metamora, The Indian Princess does not end in the phys- ical death of noble savages. It does, however, end for them in a sort of cultural death. After Smith has been saved, Nantaquas remains intrigued by European culture and says to his father: "Father, hear the design that fills my breast. I will go among the white men; I will learn their arts; and my people shall be made wise and happy."59 What might become of Nantaquas' people once they are introduced to Western culture? Furthermore, after Pocahontas falls in love with the Englishman Rolfe she exclaims: "Long, 0! long/I was the savage child of savage Nature; ... 0! 'tis from thee that I have drawn my being:/Blood-stain'd and rude, where rove my countrymen,/ And taught me heavenly truths, and fill'd my heart/With sentiments sublime, and sweet, and social."60 The play teach- es that Nantaquas, Pocahontas, and Native Americans need the "arts" and knowledge of "the white men" in order to be "wise and happy" and raised out of their "rude" and beastly state. And while the melodrama extols certain passions of the noble savage, it champions whiteness as the standard-bearer of humanity: white subjects are closest to the Good, but need to turn to the model of noble savages to regain some of the natu- ral-human qualities they lost on their move to modernity. Metamora, on the other hand, is not as forthright in its champi- oning of whiteness. The play, written by John Augustus Stone and first performed in 1829, was a star-vehicle for the period's most celebrated actor, Edwin Forrest. Furthermore, it was a favorite of Jacksonian audi- ences and, like Jack Cade and The Gladiator, is a heroic melodrama par excel- lence: a God-chosen, Arcadian hero fights an avaricious and "civilized" enemy for his land and the freedom of his family and people; he suc- cessfully leads his troops in battle, winning important military campaigns; his people start enjoying the spoils of war, turn on their leader, and let their guard down, all leading to successful retaliations from the enemy; the hero is left alone and is executed by the enemy, thereby becoming a martyr and symbol of the liberatory cause of his people.61 What sepa- 58 Ibid., 133. 59 Ibid., 134. 6 0 Ibid., 149. 6! McConachie, Melodramatic Formations, 104. AESTHETICS, I DEOLOGY, AND THE UsE OF THE V!CfiM 75 rates Metamora from Jack Cade and Spartacus (the hero of The Gladiator) is that Metamora was a clearly defined Other. (One could rightly make the case that Spartacus was, in strict ancestral terms, an Other to early American audiences. But by this time, the best of Greek and Roman cul- ture was assumed part of America's intellectual heritage because, as Thomas Jefferson so bluntly put it, they "were whites." 6 2) Perhaps more than any other character on the melodramatic stage, Metamora is the epitome of the noble savage. Oceana, the virtu- ous daughter of an Englishman, describes witnessing Metamora in his natural and primitive glory: High on a craggy rock an Indian stood, with sinewy arm and eye that pierced the glen. His bowstring drawn to win a second death, a robe of fur was o'er his shoulder thrown, and o'er his long, dark hair an eagle's plume waved in the breeze, a feathery diadem. Firmly he stood upon the jutting height, as if a sculptor's hand had carved him there. With awe I gazed as on the cliff he turned-the grandest model of might man.63 Furthermore, throughout the melodrama, Metamora acts in such a way as to legitimize his immediacy to nature: he equates bravery with being a "red man," he tells his wife that "Metamora cannot lie," and when offered gold to protect the life of one of his captives, he responds, "No! Give me back the happy days, the fair hunting ground, and the dominion my great forefathers bequeathed me."6 4 Thus, Metamora yearns for the days of yore, for "Home, Sweet Home," where he can exist in his natu- ral, primitive state without concern for the dehumanizing effects of the material world: money, competition, and technology.6s But Stone's characterization of Metamora is somewhat curious 62 Jefferson, Notes, 53. 63 John Augustus Stone, Metamora; or The Last of Wampanoags (1829); (London: Cambridge University Press, 2003), http:// collections.chadwyck/ com (accessed 8 January 2009), 11. 64 Ibid., 11, 26, 62. 65 "Home, Sweet Home" was a popular song composed by Henry Bishop and played throughout taverns and playhouses in antebellum America. It was interpolated in plays and often was the high point of the theatrical event. A melodic affirmation of the ,irtues of simplicity and nature, one verse of "Home, Sweet Home" reads: 76 jONES given the historical record of the man on whom Metamora is based: Metacomet. Metacomet not only Anglicized his name, changing it to "King Philip," but also had a legendary penchant for Boston fashion. His self-nominal and sartorial choices do not indicate a noble savage, but rather one who made calculated political decisions and was infatuated with Western culture. 66 Granted the drama is not beholden to (the impos- sible task of) achieving archival exactitude, but Stone's reworking of Metacomet is conspicuous. The question becomes, then, what to make of his Metamora vis-a-vis Metacomet. I suggest that Metamora is a con- summate product of the play's GI/ AI relation and its conservative ideol- ogy. On the one hand, Metamora (and Cade and Spartacus) is an essen- tially safe model of revolutionary hero in relation to conservatism-he and his family are slaughtered at the end of play, so who wants to follow that model? But also the notion of primitivism itself is tied to conser- vatism. Unlike liberalism, which looks forward to a sociality of contrac- tual relations based in the belief of individual and natural rights, that all men start as equals, conservatism and its derivative Primitivism (and its derivative figure the noble savage) is an "ideal anchored firmly to the past" and to past communality. In the context of early nineteenth-centu- ry thought, conservative-Primitivism argued that in important respects the old regime had been or was better than the new. In it God made them high and lowly and ordered their estate, which pleased conservatives, but he also imposed duties (however light and badly car- ried out) on the high. Men were unequai!J human, but they were not commodities valued according to the mar- ket. Above all they lived together, in tight networks of social and personal relationships, guided by the clear map of custom, social institutions, and obligations.67 Home, Sweet, home! There's no place like home, An exile from home, splendor dazzles in vain! Oh, give me my lowly thatched cottage again! The birds singing gaily that come at my cali,- Give me them, wit the peace of mind dearer than all! Home, sweet home! (Quoted in McConachie, Melodramatic Formations, 53-4.) 66 The Red King's Rebellion: Racial Politics in Nezv England, 1675-1678 (London: Oxford University Press, 1991), 1-2. 67 I-Iobsbawm, The Age of Revolution, 267, 246. Emphasis mine. AESTHETICS, IDEOLOGY, AND THE USE Of THE VICTIM 77 Although conservative-primitivism had its "advantages"-"duties" and mutual "obligations"-it was based on an ideology of natural inequality. The dissimulation of a figure such as the noble savage is that although he becomes a model of virtue, he is essentially the "high," the singular, the exception; but in such singularity, there exists a simplicity that leads to the hero's undoing by the not-noble savages around him. Spectators can revile the noble savage's simplistic singularity (the stuff of revolutionar- ies) as they revel in certain features of his virtue (the stuff of a complic- it underclass). Thus, conservatives need not fear a play such as Metamora: its GI/ AI ideological matrix-namely, conservatism wrapped in the robes of excessive emotionality-conceals its essential conservatism: the play does not deal in any real conception of Native Americans or any consideration of their plight in the new nation, but rather the play cele- brates, through a theoretical conception of the "noble savage," the virtues of a past built on the notion of natural inequality. Although by the middle of the 1830s the grand exit of elite audi- ences and paternalistic melodrama from theatres made way for the hero- ic melodrama that ostensibly celebrated "the people" and eventually the moral reform melodrama, the general ideology of conservatism and the aesthetic ideology of sentimentalism was so fixed in place that they con- tinued to mark the melodramatic form but in more concealed ways, as in the case of Metamora. But conservatives not only had melodramas about noble savages to extol the virtues of primitivism, they also could rely on melodramas that dealt with the poor to fulfill the same function. In Robert Taylor Conrad's Jack Cade (1835), for instance, after the rebel leader Cade is told that his followers believe him to be the rightful King (Mortimer), Cade says that after their successful campaign against their oppressors, he will renounce the name "Mortimer," which he adopts strategically to rally his troops, and forego the spoils of a prince: I will be Mortimer unto the world;-but only Until our chains are molten in the glow Of kindled spirits; for I seek not power, I know no glory,- save the godlike joy of making The bondman free. When we are free, Jack Cade Will back unto his hills, and proudly smile Down on the spangled meanness of the court, Claiming a title higher than their highest,- An honest man-a freeman!68 68 Robert Taylor Conrad, jack Cade: The Captain of the Commons (1835; reprint, 78 )ONES Although Jack Cade is a celebration of (American) freedom (from the British), the play is steeped in conservatism in its espousal of the natu- ralness of a society built on the few who have and the many who have not. Not that Cade needs to be preoccupied with materialism; but the melodrama substantiates an ideology that valorizes freedom to the detri- ment of the working-class person's economic and social wellbeing. In fact, Jack Cade directly argues that wealth and the material are anathema to freedom. As Cade's men are winning battles, they begin to loot and lose discipline. Lacy, Cade's closest advisor, reports: ''Ay! And find them/Drunken with triumph. They think toil and care/ Are over now, and deem that, when they're free,/Life will be but a lawless long- drawn revel .... Already they are struggling for their rank./ All would be great, all captains, leaders, lords."69 In this rebuke of the material, there is a certain anti-egalitarian spirit. The passage (and the play) expresses an anxiety about democracy in terms of the dangers of "the people" con- trolling the means of the political and economic realms. The play sug- gests a kind of decay of civilization when the masses rule; it implies the necessity of benevolent paternalism or a kind of patrician conservatism in which the few rule in order to protect the many from themselves and the vices of material. Jack Cade is similar to Robert Montgomery Bird's The Gladiator (1831). But The Gladiator is even more explicit in its condemnation of wealth. The play opens with the Thracian slave Phasarius lambasting the hedonism of the Romans: "If there be any virtue in the love of wealth, then is the praetor a most virtuous man; for he loves it better than the Gods."70 But after Phasarius joins his brother Spartacus to fight the Romans, their enslavers, he starts enjoying the wealth and fame that comes along with military success. Spartacus tries to right his brother's path and tells him of the real reason for their rebellion: home. "I think, we do not fight [for ambition]. ... Ah, would to heaven, Phasarius/I were with her now and my smiling boy,/In Thrace again, besides our moun- tain cot,/ Or in those vales, where babbling Hebrus tumbles/ Along his golden sands; and dreamt no more/Of sacks and battles." 7 1 Like the London: Cambridge University Press, 2003), http:// collections.chadwyck/ com (accessed 8 January 2009), 62. 69 Ibid., 65. 7 0 Robert Montgomery Bird, The Gladiator (1831), reprinted in Richards, Ear(y American Drama, 173. 71 Ibid., 204-205. AESTHETICS, IDEOLOGY, AND THE UsE OF THE V!crJM 79 primitivism of Metamora, The Gladiator espouses a past of simplicity that is marked by a distribution of the material that signals an inherent inequality. As conservatism would have it, on the one hand, all men should be free; on the other hand, all were not meant to enjoy material success and participate in a society of equals. Both The Gladiator and Jack Cade make the case for the importance of the perpetuation and clarity of class distinctions. They celebrate the lack of concern for wealth and rel- ative poverty as the key to the common man's happiness. This point-that most men are naturai!J disposed to be happiest without money-is best dramatized in Dion Boucicault's The Poor of New York (1857). The melodrama tells the story of several families with dif- ferent economic statuses during the Panic of 1837 and the Panic of 1857. Livingstone, a one-time moneyed elite who has lost his money in the eco- nomic downturn, tells why the formerly rich are the truly "miserable of the poor of New York": The poor!-whom do you call the poor? Do you know them? Do you see them? They are more frequently found under a black coat than under a red shirt. The poor man is the clerk with a family, forced to maintain a decent suit of clothes, paid for out of hunger of his children. The poor man is the artist who is obliged to pledge the tools of his trade to buy medicines for his sick wife. The lawyer who, craving for employment, but- tons up his thin paletot to hide his shirtless breast. These needy wretches are poorer than the poor, for they are obliged to conceal their poverty with the false mask of content-smoking a cigar to disguise their hunger- they drag from the pockets their last quarter, to cast it with studied carelessness, to the beggar, whose mattress at home is lined with gold. These are the most of the poor of New YorkJ2 This speech cannot be classified as ironic not only because Livingstone is one of the plays virtuous heroes, but more important because irony is not operative in melodrama. The message of this speech is radically conser- vative in that it suggests that it takes a special quality to deal with the sorts 72 Dion Boucicault, The Poor of New York, in A merican Melodrama, edited by Daniel C. Gerould (New York: Performing Arts Journal Publications, 1983), 47. 80 JONES of responsibilities that come with ha\'ing money and status: they are not meant for everyone. If those few on top perform their "duties" and "obligations" to the many on the bottom successfully, not only does it signal the naturalness of their high status, but also it should produce the greatest happiness of the greatest number (perhaps the conservative for- mulation of social utilitarianism). My brief survey of these play texts is meant to demonstrate the ways in which melodrama is the production of an interrelation between a general ideology of conservatism and an aesthetic ideology of senti- mentalism. Practitioners and white, male spectators developed in melo- drama a theatrical form that allowed them, at least temporarily within the playhouse, to suture some of their internecine wounds that came as a result of the American Revolution and the War of 1812, the burgeoning of capitalism, and an expanding geography. What is noteworthy about some of those melodramas is that they featured African Americans, Native Americans, and the poor as hero-victims, thus giving the impres- sion that they are counter-hegemonic texts. (The operation of gender and particularly the marginalization of women in conservative ideology in the period structured the melodramatic form in ways dissimilar to those of these groups and therefore requires its own treatment.) Yet that seeming radicalism only veiled melodrama's conservatism. Moreover, because the aesthetic of melodrama is one of exces- sive emotionality and early Americans were greatly under the influence of eighteenth-century Anglo moral sense philosophy, the qualities of con- servatism were legitimized because they made sense on the body. It is not that melodrama did not have the potential to be used by progressives; as I stated above, some groups such as radical abolitionists claimed the senti- mentality expressed on behalf of the stage slave proved white recogni- tion of black humanity and therefore necessitated universal emancipa- tion. (In 1853, for instance, abolitionist newspapers reported on the emo- tion in the audiences of a production of Uncle Tom'.s Cabin at A. H. Purdy's National Theatre in New York City. The emotion was so great that one reviewer confessed how he "hoped to remain sufficiently com- posed to study certain characters" but because of the effect of the play, "[he] was altogether disappointed [because of the] harrowing agony of soul, alternating with tearful joy and irrepressible laughter, overwhelmed me ... rendering criticism impossible."73 But this case, too, requires its own investigation.) That is to say, I recognize Thomas Postlewait's provi- so that we need "to get beyond the pervasive dichotomies" such as 73 The N ational Era, 25 August 1853. AESTHETICS, IDEOLOGY, AND THE USE OF THE VIcnM 81 "melodrama is conservative, realism is radical;"74 but what I am after here is not so much an evaluative framework by which to measure melodrama against, say, realism. But rather, my interest is in how and why the aesthet- ic of melodrama was so important to a specific group of spectators: its aestheticized conservatism and its conservative treatment of the Other- sacrifice her-generated a theatrical form that was intended to be a cul- tural fixative for a group who, given certain historical exigencies, needed intra-racial and intra-gender healing, as well as bracing for an oncoming and unrelenting modernity. 74 Thomas Postlewait, "From Melodrama to Realism: The Suspect History of American Drama," in Hays and Nikolopoulou, Melodrama, 56. JOURNAL OF AMERICAN DRAMA AND THEATRE 22, NO. 1 (WINTER 2010) COMMEMORATING HAITI ON THE HARLEM STAGE Kate Dossett On 2 March 1938, a new production opened at the Lafayette Theatre in Harlem. It dramatized the heroic resistance of former slaves to Napoleon Bonaparte's attempts to restore slavery and French rule to the island of Saint Domingue. This struggle would lead to the creation of Haiti, the first independent black republic in the New World. Written by a white newspaperman named William Dubois (not to be confused with the black intellectual W E. B. Du Bois), Haiti was intended as a warning against the dangers of miscegenation. However, in the hands of the Harlem Negro Unit, an all-black troupe that operated out of the Lafayette under the auspices of the Federal Theatre Project (FTP), the play became a celebration of Haiti's founding heroes. Toussaint L'Ouverture and Henri Christophe were represented as powerful, self- controlled, and successful black men. By contrast, General Leclerc and his army appeared as decadent Frenchmen more interested in stroking their whiskers, fighting over women, and drinking cognac than promul- gating liberty, fraternity, and equality. Unlike most white-authored dramas of black life, Haiti did not offer whites reassuring portraits of failed black masculinity. Following the efficient dispatch of the few white men too foolish or drunk to flee the final Haitian onslaught, the play ended with Henri Christophe triumphant before a crowd of cheering, independent Haitians. These images of powerful black manhood were ones that neither black nor white audiences were accustomed to seeing on the American stage. White critics reviewing the opening night attempted to place Haiti within a white dramatic tradition of black primitivism, claiming it to be "a rousing, primitive melodrama."! Yet they also noted that black audi- ences seemed unusually receptive to the play's ending: Time magazine observed that "When the Haitians win their freedom from the French at the end, the Negroes in the audience burst into frenzied, deep-throated applause." The critic for the New York Sun noted that the opening night "had Harlem cheering at the close last night like a college football crowd watching a long-legged halfback go to town." These were not isolated comments. The Boston Herald noted that "the smashing climax, with Christopher coming down from the mountains to drive the French into 1 Brooks Atkinson, New York Times, 6 March 1938, 149. 84 DOSSETT the sea, takes on heightened intensity before a predominantly Negro audience," while the Brook!Jn Eagle reported that "The audience hailed the play at the end with the enthusiasm of thrilled children." But even as white critics mocked what they saw as the childishness of the audience, they recognized the uniqueness of the dramatization. As Brooks Atkinson, theatre critic for the New York Times acknowledged: "If it is a tale that made the hair of the French army curl, it does the same for the toupee theatergoer. Not very many historical plays turn out so well for Harlem."2 The purpose of this article is to examine how Haiti became a play that "turned out well" for Harlem. Specifically, I will explore how the black theatre troupe, black critics, and the broader Harlem community managed to transform Dubois's racist play into a celebration of black agency, and why this white-authored Federal Theatre play became an important black lieu de memoire or site of memory.3 Haiti had become an important symbol of black resistance for African Americans following the successful slave revolution of 1791. In the twentieth century, Haiti's status as the harbinger of black liberation was compromised when it was invaded and occupied by the U.S. between 1915 and 1934. Military occupation was accompanied by a fascination with the culture of the "Magic Island" on the part of white writers and dramatists. White-authored plays of Haiti written in the interwar period offer important context for understanding the 1938 production of Dubois's Haiti. Eugene O'Neill's regularly performed Emperor Jones (1920) and Orson Welles's so-called Voodoo Macbeth (1936) explored black men's ill-fated aspirations for self-determination while indulging white fantasies of savage black masculinity. Produced in a political context that encouraged audiences to make links between the African American pres- ent and the Haitian past, these plays helped create the environment in which Haiti came to be staged. But whereas O'Neill's and Welles's heroes are defeated, in Haiti, black men are triumphant. That Haiti broke the mold established by previous white-authored dramas was due in no small part to the black-directed memory work which directly shaped the pro- duction, performance, and reception of Dubois's play. By memory work I refer to the unstable, dynamic process of remembrance, a process 2 "New Plays in Manhattan," Time, Monday, 14 March 1938; Herrick Brown, NeJV York Sun, 3 March 1938; Boston Herald, 5 March 1928; Arthur Pollack, Brook!Jn Eagle, 3 March 1938, in Vassar College Collection of Press Clippings Relating to Plays, 1937-1939, RG69, Box 129, NA; Brooks Atkinson, "The Play," Ne/JJ York Times, 3 March 1938, 16. 3 Pierre Nora, "Between Memory and History: Les Lieux de Memoire," Representations 26 (Spring, 1989): 7-24. COMMEMORATING HAITI ON THE HARLEM STAGE 85 "dependent on notions of the future as much as on images of the past" and in which identifying agency- who remembers, how, why, and when-is central. 4 As Maria Grever reminds us, "the receivers in the process of reception do not remain passive. Memory participants some- times integrate and use the received meanings and values in their own cul- ture, and might disturb the larger mnemonic community to which they also belong. From this point of view culture consumption is also culture production."S Black memory participants in and around the production of Haiti were not passive receptacles of white men's visions of Haiti. Reviving the Harlem theatre community that had developed out of the Harlem Experimental Theatre and Little Theatres of the 1920s, black audiences, critics, and civic and political leaders responded to the Negro Unit's staging of the Haitian revolution in ways that reclaimed Haiti as a memory site for black Americans. Their active engagement with the pro- duction disrupted popular white narratives of Haiti, and enabled them to become producers of culture.6 U.S. occupation, white dramatizations of Haiti, and the active memory work of a black community all shaped the production of Haiti, but they do not explain why it was this particular Haiti play and this par- ticular production which was able to bring to life the Haitian past for a contemporary black audience. The Haitian revolution was a popular sub- ject for black playwrights in the interwar period; Langston Hughes's Troubled Island and C. L. R. James's Toussaint L'Ouverture are only the most well known of the many black-authored dramas of the revolution authored in these years. Haiti plays, as Michelle Stephens has argued, gave black playwrights "the chance to explore the possibilities and limits of black statehood."7 The subsequent failure of black government in Haiti however could serve to highlight the "limits" rather than the "possibili- ties" as Hughes's attempts to explore the roots of this failure demon- 4 Jay Winter, Remembering War: The Great War Betzveen Memory and History in the Twentieth Century (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006), 3-4. 5 Maria Grever, "Beyond Petrified Histories: Gender and Collective Memory," Museumsblatt Mitteilungen aus dem MuseumsJVesen Baden-Wiirllembergs 34, no. 5 (April 2003): 2. 6 Adrienne C. Macki, "Reconstructing Community and Identity: Harlem Experimental Theatre and Social Protest," journal of American Drama and Theatre 20, no. 2 (Spring 2008): 107-39. 7 Michelle Stephens, Black Empire: The Masculine Global Imaginary of Caribbean Intellectuals in the United States, 1914-1962 (Durham: Duke University Press, 2005), 211. 86 DOSSETI strated.B The Harlem Negro Unit production avoided the problem of sustainable black government by focusing instead on Haitians' successful resistance to white rule. In doing so, it offered audiences the opportuni- ty to cheer Haitian heroes on the American stage: night after night (well, atleast 103 of them) Harlemites could witness black men whipping white soldiers before large interracial audiences. By contrast, black-authored Haiti plays were either never performed or reached only limited audiences through very short runs at Little Theatres.9 It was not only in the per- forming arts that black Americans investigated Haiti. To name just a few, writers such as Arna Bontemps and Zora Neale Hurston, and the artist Jacob Lawrence's Federal Arts Project-sponsored Toussaint L'Ouverture series (1937-38) were also part of this effort to reclaim Haiti during the interwar period. lO Yet it was the Federal Theatre production that publicly mobilized discussion around the meaning and memory of Haiti. To understand why, we need to understand the unique mission and set up of the FTP which made its productions unusually alive to public engage- ment. First, however, we must examine the place of Haiti in U.S. history. Haiti and U.S. History Beginning with the successful slave revolution in 1791 and declaration of independence in 1804, Haiti became an important symbol of black 8 For Hughes's play as, "a study in failure," see Arthur Rampersad, The Ufi of Langston Hughes: Vol I: 1901-1941: I Too Sing America (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), 330-33. Troubled Island was rejected by FTP playreaders. See FTP Play script and Radio script Collection, George Mason University, Box 7. 9 E. Quita Craig discusses all three scripts in Black Drama of the Federal Theatre Era (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1980), especially 161-71; C. L. R. James's Toussaint L'Ouverture played for two nights at the Westminster Theatre in 1936 with Paul Robeson in the title role. See Paul Buhle, C L R James: The Artist as Revolutionary (New York: Verso, 1988), 57; For a discussion of how James used the play to explore black state- hood, see Stephens, Black Empire, especially 205-222. For a discussion of rarely performed black-authored Haiti plays see Clare Corbould, Becoming African Americans: Black Public Ufi in Harlem (Cambridge, MA: Hanard University Press, 2009), especially 174--92. 10 Arna Bontemps, Dmms at Dusk: A Novel (New York: Macmillan, 1939; Baton Rouge: Louisiana Srate University Press, 2009); Zora Neale Hurston, Tell My Horse: Voodoo and Ufi in Haiti and Jamaica (Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1938; New York: Perennial Library, 1990); Peter T. Nesbett and Michelle DuBois, eds., Jacob Lawrence: Paintings, Drawings, and Murals (1935-1999): A Catalogue Raisonne (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2000). For an overview of Haiti in African American culture see Maurice Jackson, "Friends of the Negro! Fly with me, The Path is Open to the Sea": Remembering the Haitian Revolution in the History, Music, and Culture of the African American People," Earb American Sllldies: An Interdisciplinary Journal6, no. 1 (2008): 59-103. COMMEMORATING HAITI ON THE HARLEM STAGE 87 agency and power for African Americans. Yet both as a political entity and as a symbol of black resistance, Haiti would need constant protec- tion and reinforcement against the encroachments of whites. Across the diaspora, slaves and slaveholders immediately grasped that the Haitian revolution could serve as inspiration for black freedom struggles. Leaders of slave rebellions in the United States, Gabriel Prosser and Denmark Vesey called upon memories of heroic Haitian resistance, promising their followers that the Haitian republic would help them destroy white Americans. Black freedom fighters frequently evoked the Haitian revolu- tion in ways that not only encouraged their followers but also terrorized whites, drawing on violent imagery, powerful black masculinity, and the power of voodoo. In turn, white Americans summoned the spectre of a Haitian bloodbath to justify severe punishment of slave dissent in gener- al and attempted slave insurrection in particular. II The events of the Haitian revolution and the meaning African Americans ascribed to them continued to challenge white supremacy long after they took place. Historians have recently begun to document how African Americans commemorated the events of the Haitian revo- lution through the construction of lieux de memoire.12 According to the French historian Pierre Nora, les /ieux de memoire originate, "with the sense that there is no spontaneous memory, that we must deliberately create archives, maintain anniversaries, organize celebrations, [and] pronounce eulogies."I3 As Elizabeth Raub Bethel has demonstrated, for African Americans the creation of Haitian sites of memory was both a direct result and would become an important part of their search for a better home in the nineteenth century. B.etween the 1820s and 1850s, waves of immigration of black Americans to Haiti and back again, as well as the frequent Caribbean crossings by black sailors, generated a shared knowl- edge of black America and Haiti which helped connect the American present with the Haitian past through "a body of shared beliefs, myths, and images."14 In the twentieth century, this body of "beliefs, myths, and 11 Jackson, "Friends of the Negro! Fly with me," 61-66. 12 Elizabeth Rauh Bethel, "Images of Hayti: The Construction of An Afro- American Lieu De Memoire," Callaloo 15, no. 3 (Summer, 1992): 827-41. For essays on African American lieu de mimoire, see Genevieve Fabre and Robert O'Meally eds., History and Memory in African-American Culture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994). 13 Nora, "Between Memory and History," 12. 14 Bethel, "Images of Hayti," 827-28, 840. 88 DossEn images" came under renewed attack when the United States invaded and occupied Haiti in July 1915 on the pretext of rescuing the republic from anarchy and defending foreign interests, following a military coup which ejected the incumbent president. 1 5 During the nineteen-year occupation that ensued, Haitians lived under a puppet government held in place by U.S. force. Facing press censorship, surveillance, and curfews, Haitian protest movements were brutally suppressed.J6 The occupation of the black republic by an increasingly dominant U.S. meant that African Americans' Haitian lieu de memoire-Christophe's fort, tales of Toussaint's heroic leadership, and the defeat of Napoleon's army-risked being sup- planted by harrowing new sites of twentieth-century colonial encounter. African Americans had to renew their efforts to build, defend, and recov- er Haiti as a site of memory and a political entity. The U.S. government had justified their occupation of a sovereign state by employing pater- nalistic rhetoric about black men's political unfitness for autonomous rule. In protesting U.S. occupation of an independent black state, African Americans resisted this narrative and called for the reinvigoration of the Haiti of collective black memory, a place where Africans had not only successfully resisted white rule in the past, but must resist white rule in the future. As W E. B. Du Bois explained, African Americans "must cease to think of Liberia and Haiti as failures in government .... [T]hese are the pictures of each other which white people have painted for us and which with engaging naivete we accept, and then proceed to laugh at each other and criticize each other before we make any attempt to learn the truth." 1 7 One truth that African American critics revealed was that U.S. occupation had left in its place no new model democracy, but rather an authoritarian leader who presided over a state economically dependent on and financially beneficial to the United States. When, in 1934, the second independent New World republic emerged from occupation by the first, Haiti as memory and Haiti's new emerging history were at war.18 1 5 Brenda Gayle Plummer, Haiti and the United States: The Psychological Moment (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1992), 90-91. 16 Ibid., 102-3. 1 7 W E. B. Du Bois, "Pan-Africa and New Racial Philosophy," The Crisis 40 (November 1933): 247, 262. 18 Plummer, Haiti and the United States, 139-44. For discussion of U.S. military occupation and subsequent withdrawal see Mary Renda, Taking Haiti: Military Occupation and the Culture of U.S. Imperialism, 1915-1940 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001). COMMEMORATING HAITI ON THE HARLEM STAGE 89 Meanwhile American military forays in the tropics had opened up space for white cultural occupation of Haiti. White artists, authors, and dramatists grasped the opportunity offered by the occupation to explore those exotic ingredients-primitivism and voodoo-that appar- ently contributed to Africans' failure to self-govern. Their endeavors found an enthusiastic outlet: in the 1920s and 1930s American publish- ing houses lapped up white-authored travelogues, novels, and plays set in Haiti whose titles often included the words voodoo, fire, magic, or prim- itive.19 Although these accounts capitalized on recent interest in Haitian affairs they also relied on a shared cultural understanding of Haiti's sym- bolic status as signifier of Africans' racial inferiority. For example, in his review of Richard Loderer's 1935 travelogue, Voodoo Fire in Haiti, the New York Times critic Edward Allen deployed the tropes of primitivism-can- nibalism and voodoo--to connect the "savagery" of the slave uprising of 1791 with the "confusion" of the Haitian political present and the most well-known white American race drama, Eugene O'Neill's The Emperor Jones. Describing voodoo as "a fiendishly active cult" "a horrible old-out religion" but one which the "best informed white men have as yet been unable to penetrate," Allen's review suggests that voodoo signified more than a fascination with the exotic; it was the key to a different, impene- trable, and unknowable black masculinity.20 Blacks' susceptibility to voodoo in white travelogues and novels often stands in for hypersexual- ity and lack of self-control, characteristics believed to be inherent in African Americans, and which could be drawn upon to shore up the political, social, and economic privileges of whiteness in the United States. Whites, by contrast, might entertain an intellectual interest in voodoo, but they were not prepared to let superstition and black magic get the better of them. Summarizing whites' relationship to Haiti, Allen declared: "Loederer has gone as far as the majority of readers will care to follow." Many white readers however were prepared to follow their inter- est in Haiti into the theatre where they could view voodoo for them- selves. The more risk-averse could enjoy the experience from the comfort of their own homes, as Allen advised: ~ f t e r reading of this spectacle, 1 9 See for example John W Vandercook, Black Majesty (New York: Literary Guild of America, 1928); William Seabrook, The Magic Island (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1929); and Richard Loderer's Voodoo Fire in Haiti (New York: Literary Guild of America, 1935). For discussion of white-authored Haiti texts, see Mary Renda, Taking Haiti, espe- cially chapters 5 and 6. 20 Edward Frank Allen, "Haiti Interpreted by the Flaring Light of Voodooism," New York Times, 28 July 1935, BR 3. 90 D OSSF.Tf one might reasonably taper off by re-reading Eugene O'Neill's 'The Emperor Jones."'21 It is important, as Allen suggests, to remind ourselves of O'Neill's 1920 play because it influenced white conceptions of "Negro" drama well into the 1930s. The Emperor Jones dramatized what happens when black men aspire to political rule. A one-act play set in Haiti, the play unfolds across eight scenes which are structured around the mono- logues of the central character Brutus Jones. An African American who escapes to the island as a fugitive from American justice, Jones is described by the playwright as "a tall, powerfui!J-built, full-blooded negro of middle age. His features are typically negroid," and "His eyes are alive with a keen, cunning intelligence."22 Using this combination of wile and brute strength-he tricks the "natives" into believing his life is protected by a charm that only a silver bullet can r upture- Jones takes control of the island. Although Brutus Jones assumes the trappings of power including a royal court "to turn de heads o'de low-flung bush niggers," underneath he is no more capable of self mastery than his black sub- jects.23 On discovering that the islanders are tired of his high taxes and preparing to revolt, Jones embarks on a carefully planned escape route through the forest. His rational retreat however is short-lived; reduced to a near naked, superstitious wreck by the beat of the voodoo drums, Jones's past sins and African heritage haunt him in a series of hallucina- tions, which eventually incapacitate his flight. Although he is fini shed off in the final scene by a witch doctor who has furnished the silver bullet believed necessary to kill the mighty Jones, it is his reversion to primi- tivism which leads to his political and physical death. This is Jones's fail- ure, his racial destiny. His African descent means he shares the fate of all black men. Unable to master their primitive instincts and desires, black men are not fit to rule. First performed by the black actor Charles Gilpin and the Provincetown Players in November 1920, Emperor Jones received high acclaim from white critics and audiences alike. White critics hailed O'Neill's expressionist experiment as " just about the most interesting 21 Ibid. 22 The prefatory note explains that the play is set "on an island in the West Indies as yet not self-determined by White Marines," an easily understood, if caustic ref- erence to the U.S.'s defense that its occupation of Haiti represented merely a temporary trusteeship. Eugene O'Neill, The Emperor Jones (London: Jonathan Cape, 1925), 150. Emphasis mine. 23 Ibid., 153. COMMEMORATING HAITI ON THE HARLEM STAGE 91 play which has yet come from the most prormsmg playwright in America." White audiences agreed: Charles Gilpin would play the title role for 204 performances at the Princess Theatre in New York before embarking on a two-year tour. Far from making white audiences feel complicit in the wages of whiteness or troubled by the legacy of slavery and continued colonial oppression, Emperor Jones offered a legitimate space for whites to consume physically powerful black male bodies in the role of the "burly darky."24 African American critics were divided in their response. Some welcomed what they saw as at least an attempt to examine the black man's mind in a serious fashion, but others were troubled by the portrait of the black primitive. The critic for the black nationalist newspaper, the Negro World was clear in his judgment that white critics considered Emperor Jones "great" for one reason only: "it is pronounced a great play by the critics, but they are whites, and will pronounce anything good that has white supremacy as its theme." Others found it ridiculous. Langston Hughes memorably recalled black audiences' amused cries for the Emperor to "come on out o' that jungle-back to Harlem where you belong" when Jules Bledsoe attempted to perform the role before black audiences at the Lincoln Theatre in Harlem. While in Washington DC, the Emperor was similarly the source of mirth to black audiences. Indeed, O'Neill's well- worn stereotypes were familiar enough to black audiences for his play to become the subject of at least two parodies performed in Harlem in the interwar period.25 24 Heywood Broun, "The 'Emperor Jones' by O'Neill Gives Chance for Cheers," New York Tribune, 4 November 1920, 8; "burly darky" in Alexander Woollcott "Second Thoughts on First Nights," Ne1v York Times, 7 November 1920, 88; Paul Robeson, who had already followed Gilpin into other roles, would also make the part his own, first in the 1924 Broadway version and again in the 1933 motion picture of Du Bose Heyward's screenplay. 25 Negro World cited in David Krasner, A Beautiful Pageant: African American Theatre, Drama and Performance in the Harlem Renaissance (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002), 195; Langston Hughes, The Big Sea (1940; New York: Thunders Mouth Press, 1986), 258; Errol G. Hill and James V Hatch eds., A History of Afncan American Theatre (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 516, fn 44; "'Pudden Jones' Scores as Delightful Little Farce," Amsterdam News, 13 May 1925, 6; Langston Hughes, "The Em- Fuehrer Jones," in Lost Plays of the Harlem Rmaissance edited by James V Hatch and Leo Hamalian (Detroit: Wayne State University Press), 358-361. For black critics who wel- comed the play as an attempt at serious mainstream black drama see Jean Toomer "Negro Psychology in The Emperor Jones" (1921 ), in Jean Toomer: Selected Essays and Uterary CritiCism, edited by Robert B. Jones (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1996), 6; Montgomery Gregory, "The Drama of Negro Life," in Alain Locke ed., The New Negro (1925; New York: Atheneum, 1968), 157. 92 DossETI More recent commentators have suggested that The Emperor Jones offered black actors new opportunities to shape the representation of black men on the American stage and at least examined the idea of black men's guest for self-determination.26 Serious examination or not, O'Neill's hero is undone not by whites and the injustices of the colonial system, but rather by his incapacity for self-mastery, a failing that makes him no better than the "bush niggers" he tricked into gaining his tempo- rary crown. In staging the Emperor's reversion to primitivism, the play built upon, rather than resisted, the degrading stereotypes of blacks that white Americans were accustomed to finding on the American stage and which were used to justify the subordination of black men at home and in Haiti. O'Neill's play did not, as some of its apologists have suggested, offer a universal portrait of man's retreat to barbarism under pressure, but rather relied upon racial stereotypes so hackneyed they made black audiences laugh.2 7 It is important to remember that Emperor Jones was continuously performed not because it amused black theatre-goers or because it offered a powerful critique of colonialism, but because whites watched, read, and loved the play. Simultaneously entertained and reas- sured, white audiences and critics would come back again and again to see this "extraordinarily striking and dramatic study of panic fear."28 By the time the FTP was established in 1935, the U.S. had withdrawn from a much weakened Haiti, and O'Neill had an assured place in the American theatre canon. His play, Emperor Jones had become the lens through which white Americans created and received serious dramatic representations of black manhood. This had a direct impact on the FTP because much of the black theatre produced under its auspices was chosen, produced, directed, and written by whites. 26 Krasner, A Beautiful Pageant, 197-203; Charles Musser, "To Redream the Dreams of White Playwrights: Reappropriation and Resistance in Oscar 11icheaux's Body and Soul," Yale Journal of Criticism 12, no. 2 (Fall 1999): 331; Hatch and Hill eds., A History of African American Theatre, 229; Renda, Taking Haiti, 187. 27 For two accounts which reject the tendency to see universalism in the Emperor Jones, and place race back at the heart of the play, see John Cooley, "In Pursuit of the Primitive: Black Portraits by Eugene O'Neill and Other Village Bohemians," in The Harlem Renaissance Re-examined edited by Victor A. Kramer (Troy, NY: Whitsun Publishing Co., 1997), 83-97; and Carme Manuel, ''A Ghost in the Expressionist Jungle O'Neill's The Emperor Jones," African American Review 39, no. 1/2 (Spring 2005): 66-85. 2 8 Alexander Woollcott, "Second Thoughts on First Nights," New York Times, 7 November 1920, 88. COMMEMORATING Hi\ITI ON THE H A R L E ~ STAGE 93 The Federal Theatre Project and Black Theatre The FTP was part of the Works Progress Administration set up by President Roosevelt's New Deal Administration in 1935 as a federal jobs program designed to alleviate the high levels of unemployment during America's worst economic depression. Led by the dynamic Hallie Flanagan, the project's mission was twofold: to get unemployed actors, directors, playwrights, and stage technicians off relief, and to encourage creativity in the performing arts. Ambitious to produce new types of the- atre that represented the diversity of the American experience, Flanagan set up a range of production units, including seventeen so-called "Negro Units." Across the U.S., black theatre professionals, from actors, musi- cians, and dancers, to theatre technicians and stage hands, were employed on federal wages and performed plays before both regular theatregoers and thousands of ordinary black Americans many of whom experienced a live production for the first time. Although the Negro Unit's mission was to relieve unemployment of black theatre professionals, nearly all directors of Negro Units, and the majority of individual productions were directed by whites. Only the Boston Negro Unit employed a black director for the whole four years of the FTP. As Rena Fraden's excellent study of the Negro Units has demonstrated, white oversight of Negro Units and in particular pro- gramming could cause considerable intra and inter racial conflict within local communities, as well as the wider theatre community. 29 The over- whelming majority of plays produced by Negro Units, particularly in the first year of the FTP, were either written by white dramatists or blacked up versions of the classic white repertoire.30 At the regional level, plan- ning boards were usually constituted of an entirely white membership, which explains in part this reliance on the existing white repertoire; but it was also a consequence of the FTP's national structures. FTP officials often blamed the lack of trained black dramatists for the scarcity of black-authored plays appearing on the federal stage. Yet the reports of white play readers, who worked for the National Service Bureau (the cen- tral body through which plays were approved for production and sent out 29 Rena Fraden, Blueprints for a Black Federal Theatre (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), especially 93-97. 30 For a list of so-called "black plays" put on by Negro Units see, "Catalog- Calendar of Productions: African American Theatre," in "Cultural Diversiry in the Federal Theatre Project, 1935-1939," 29-57, finding aid compiled by Lorraine Brown, Center for the Federal Theatre Project, George Mason University. 94 DOSSETI to regional units), reveal that they read and considered many black- authored plays. These black dramas (including those by Langston Hughes and Theodore Ward) were often rejected, or recommended only with strong reservations, because they failed to conform to the white stereo- types of African Americans which white play readers believed to be essential to "authentic" "Negro" drama.3 1 Unsurprisingly, comic tales of simple but happy-go-lucky black types were more often found in white- authored "black" plays than in new contemporary dramas of urban black life. But white play readers also highly recommended "serious" dramas of black folk life, including plays by O'Neill, Paul Green, Marc Connelly, and Dorothy and Du Bose Heyward. As one white play reader, H. K. Fishel explained in his gushing report on the Heywards' Porgy, it fell to white playwrights to "tap that rich source of wholly American folk-drama," because "negro authors have contributed but little to the rapidly accu- mulating store of negro folk drama."32 The FTP then clearly shared many of the limitations of the com- mercial theatre when it came to producing black drama. At the same time, there were aspects of the FTP that made it much more open to black input. As a relief program, the FTP's first priority was reemployment. Theatre units were required to spend 90 percent of all production costs on wages, which, unlike the strictures of commercial theatre, encouraged productions on a massive scale in terms of casts and crew. The size of casts and multiplicity of officials responsible for productions at the the- atre, city project, and national level of the FTP made it even more diffi- cult for one director to control a production; indeed, the political fac- tions, labor disputes, and walk-outs within FTP units are legendary.33 A second priority was to produce theatre which reflected and was accessi- ble to the whole range of Americans whose tax dollars supported it. 31 Some historical accounts have repeated white FTP officials' claims that there were simply no black dramatists and/ or plays in existence. See for example Jo. A Tanner, "Classical Black Theatre: The Federal Theatres' All-Black 'Voodoo Macbeth,"' Journal of American Drama and Theatre 7, no. 1 (Winter 1995): 55. 3 2 See Playreaders Report File, 1935-1939, especially "Porgy," Box 286. Hughes's Troubled Island was dismissed as "Just another Black Majesty Melodrama," "Twubled Island," Box 336, Federal Theatre Project Collection, Library of Congress (FfP-LOq. 33 Particularly in New York City where the theatre industry had long been unionized and also served as a hub for many black political organizations. See "New York State Correspondence, Hallie Flanagan, Labor Relations; Project Reports, Publicity and Promotion" in "Correspondence with Regional Offices I-V, 1935-1939," Record Group (RG) 69, Box 57, National Archives (NA). COMMEMORATING HAITI ON THE H A R L E ~ STAGE 95 Paternalistic they may have been, but FTP bureaucrats did try to facilitate productions they thought were relevant to the community, and they did try to fmd out what communities wanted through audience surveys which ran for the first two years of the project before the budget cuts in 1937.34 Public funding also meant that federal theatre seats were either free, or priced between 10 and 55 cents, allowing Americans to experience live theatre for the f.trst time and guaranteeing even the worst productions a decent run and an audience beyond the dreams and capacity of both commercial and Little Theatres. The use of audience surveys, the media spotlight on a politically contentious state run theatre, and FTP officials' public statements led black theatre-goers to expect plays which reflected their own lives and interests. As Hallie Flanagan explained in 1936: "It is of no value whatever to stimulate theatre-going unless, once inside our doors, our audience sees something which has some vital connection with their own lives and their own immediate problems." When they did not, as voluminous FTP correspondence shows, audiences could be relied upon to tell them and anyone else who would listen.35 Voodoo Macbeth "A cast full of Emperor Jones" One of the first Negro Units to be set up, and based in the U.S.'s theatre capital, the Harlem Negro Unit was catapulted to stardom with Orson Welles and John Houseman's 1936 production of Macbeth. The Haitian- inspired Macbeth may have failed to connect with the immediate problems of black life, but it stimulated theatre-going, becoming the FTP's first "box-office" hit in 1936.36 For most white critics attending the opening 34 Audience surveys can be found in "General Correspondence of the National Office 1935-39," RG69, Box 2, NA. For a discussion of the surveys see Fraden, Blueprints for a Black Federal Theatre, 144-46. 35 Flanagan cited in Jane de Hart Matthews, The Federal Theatre, 1935-39: Plays, Relief and Politics (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1967), 89. The Chicago Negro Unit rivaled the New York project in terms of number of complaints about individual productions, programing choices and FrP officials. See "Regional Office Chronological Correspondence File 1937-38," RG69, Box 618-621, NA. 36 Although the Unit would later be directed by a black triumvirate, when it was first set up the Hungarian-born, British-educated John Houseman was appointed as direc- tor alongside black theatre veteran Rose McClendon, who resigned shortly after her appointment due to terminal illness. Macbeth had been preceded by two black-authored plays, Frank Wilson's Walk Together Chill11n and Rudolph Fisher's Conjure Man Dies, which attracted audiences of 10,530 (5,037 free tickets) and 83,588 (75,782 free tickets) respec- tively. Compare this with Macbeth's figures of 117,244, of which only 21,647 seats were 96 DossE1T night on 14 April 1936, Welles's Macbeth was haunted by the still fre- quently performed Emperor Jones. Burns Mantle drew on familiar imagery to interpret the play for white New Yorkers: "It's a little as though O'Neill's Emperor Jones had re-established his kingdom in the South Sea Islands and staged a monster fete." Arthur Pollack declared "This lviacbeth seems to have a cast full of Emperor Jones," while Brooks Atkinson saw not Shakespeare, but rather "a voodoo show inspired by the Macbeth leg- end." He nevertheless praised those scenes which enabled black actors to showcase their "natural" talent: "when the play falls within their Emperor Jones caprice, they have the artists and actors who can translate supernat- uralism into flaring excitement."37 These and many other white critics applauded the color and excitement of Macbeth and warmly recommend- ed the "experience" to their readers. Macbeth offered white Americans the opportunity to enjoy the warmth of a "simpler race," even as it con- firmed white superiority, as the critic for Vogue explained: the whites came in droves to spread their chilly fingers before the reviving fires of a warmer, happier, simpler race .... In watching them, we capture briefly what once we were, long centuries ago before our ancestors suf- fered the blights of thought, worry, and the printed word.3 8 That critics connected Macbeth with Emperor Jones was hardly sur- prising. Welles's Macbeth, like Brutus Jones, is ultimately unmanned by a combination of voodoo and superstition; like Jones he will meet the pre- destined fate of black men who aspire to self-determination. With the free. Negro Productions at the Lafayette Theatte" in "Press Releases of the Department of Information" RG69, Box 533, NA. 37 By haunting I refer to Marvin Carlson's notion that the audience's experience of the theatte "is always ghosted by previous experiences and associations while these ghosts are simultaneously shifted and modified by the processes of recycling and recol- lection." Marvin Carlson, The Haunted Stage: The Theatre As Memory Machine (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2001), 2; Burns Mantle, Ne1v York Dai!J News, 15 April1936 and Arthur Pollack, Brook!Jn Dai!J Eagle, 16 April 1936, both cited in Richard France, "Introduction" to Orson Welles On Shakespeare: The WP.A and Mercury Theatre Piayscripts, (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1990), 15; Brooks Atkinson, "The Play," N ew York Times, 15 April 1936, 25. 38 Robert Littell, "Macbeth in Chocolate," reprinted in Reader's Digest, January 1937, 88-89 cited in John O'Connor, "But Was It 'Shakespeare?': Welles's 'Macbeth' and 'Julius Caesar,"' Theatre Journa/32, no. 3 (1980): 338. COMMEMORATING HAl'TI ON THE HARLEM STAGE 97 play transposed from Scotland to the sizzling forests of Henri Christophe's Haiti, whites saw on Welles's stage not the demise of a hero- villain whose wrong choices brought about a tragic ending, but rather a race of primitive beings whose destinies were not their own. Welles adapted the script so that lines uttered by mortals were put into the mouths of supernatural figures. The roles of the witches and Hecate (now a voodoo priest) were at the centre of the action and those lines where mortal characters debate possible courses of action and make choices were cut, along with the agency of Macbeth, Banquo, and Macduff. Welles's Macbeth is directed not by his own ambition but by the will of the witches, ruled by voodoo priest Hecate. It is they who set into motion a series of murderous acts that will elevate Macbeth to kingship but that ultimately also lead to his demise. Welles not only offered a stage peopled with so many Emperors Jones but the dark jungle scenery and constant voodoo drumming also evoked the earlier play. Indeed Welles' script is replete with demands for a "voodoo effect," which was provid- ed by the Sierra Leonean performer Asadata Dafora Hunton and his dance troupe with voodoo drumming led by an "African witch doctor, known simply as Abdul."39 As Susan McCloskey has demonstrated, in Welles's hands, the drama of Macbeth was to be found in spectacle and melodrama, rather than in the freedom to make the wrong choices that accompanies tragedy.40 Although white critics focused on what they saw as obvious con- nections between Macbeth and Emperor Jone.r, black critics were keen to put distance between Macbeth and earlier white dramas of black life. This might have been partly a response to the rumors during the three long months of rehearsals that Welles and Houseman were preparing a Shakespearian burlesque intended to mock black aspiration to serious drama.41 Quashing such speculation, black critics welcomed the produc- tion and urged their readers to spend an evening at the Lafayette. Unlike 39 Richard France, The Theatre of Orson Welles (London: Associated University Presses, 1977), 65. For a discussion of scenery and costume see Bernice Kliman, Macbeth (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2004), 115-18. 4 0 Susan McCloskey, "Shakespeare, Orson Welles, and the 'Voodoo' Macbeth," Shakespeare Quarterly 36, no. 4: 413-4. 4 1 "They Came to Scoff, but Left to Cheer Macbeth," Afro-American, 25 April 1936, 10; "New York Macbeth Glamourous Presentation: Masses Turn Out to Jeer, Stay to Cheer, Applaud," Pittsburgh Courier, 25 April 1936, A 7; Houseman, &n-Tbrough, 190-1; Orson Welles Interview by Richard Marienstras, reprinted in Mark W Estrin, Orson Welles Interviews Qackson: University Press of Mississippi), 154. 98 DOSSE'IT Emperor Jones, when Macbeth opened before a star-studded interracial audi- ence, there were no reports of contemptuous black (or white) laughter. According to the black press, audiences loved it. On the play's reception, the New York Age reported that: "the audience, white and Negro cheered itself hoarse." On the play's significance it declared: "this production proved to Harlem that it could create and support a Shakespearean play of its own." It "marked Harlem's cultural coming of age."42 Ralph Matthews of the Afro American suggested that Macbeth had answered the question "'Can colored actors do Shakespeare?' ... so completely that none but fools would venture such a query again."43 As these comments on a coming of age suggest, black critics were also eager to disassociate Macbeth from Emperor Jones because they saw in the Negro Unit a precious opportunity to create a serious black community theatre. So although black reviews paid attention to many aspects of the production, they tended to emphasize the significance of Shakespeare beingperformedby black actors and watched by black audiences in Harlem. In his review, Adam Clayton Powell J r. showered praised on the production as a whole, but lamented the closing of so many Harlem theatres in recent years. Stressing Macbeth's important transitional role in Harlem's theatre history, he welcomed a production that he believed could lead to the rebirth of serious black theatre: "Macbeth" he pro- claimed, "has saved the day." But the production was only a first step; Harlemites must support and direct the theatre and its productions, "The Negro Theatre is not sufficient, it must be the Negro's."44 Powell's demand was made more urgent by the often patronizing reviews and mis- interpretations of white critics who insisted on viewing through the lens of primitive and powerless masculinity. Although he also praised the production, black critic Roi Otley was particularly troubled by the Emperor Jones lens through which white critics viewed Macbeth, complain- ing of "the Broadway reviewers . .. [who] journeyed to Harlem with the idea of seeing a mixture of Emperor Jones and Stepin Fechit [sic], with burlesque thrown in to season a palatable opinion many of their readers 42 "Negroes Hail Real Theater as Macbeth Usurps Harlem: All-Colored Cast Plays Shakespeare-Audience Ri\als Hollywood's," New York Age, 15 April 1936, cited in Mona Z. Smith, Becoming Something: Tbe Story of Canada Lee (Ne>\' York: Faber and Faber, 2004), 57. 4 3 Ralph Matthews, Afro-American, 25 April 1936, 10. 44 Adam Clayton Powell Jr., "The Soapbox," Amsterdam Nezvs, 9 May 1936, 12. 45 Roi Ottley, New Tbeatre, May 1936, 24. COMMEMORATING H AITI ON THE H ARLEM STAGE 99 have of the Negro."45 African American reviewers and cultural commentators seized on Macbeth as proof that Harlem could sustain a black theatre. Its success was vital because it would demonstrate the need for and viability of a Negro Unit in Harlem. At the same time Powell, Otley, and many of those working within the Negro Unit, were looking toward a future where black Americans controlled black theatre. Under the direction of Welles and Houseman, the Negro Unit had staged a spectacularly suc- cessful production. Macbeth played at the Lafayette for ten weeks before moving first downtown and then on to a nationwide tour of thirteen weeks. It reached an estimated 120,000 people.46 But even if Macbeth attracted large audiences, its theme offered little opportunity for black community engagement: weak black man, manipulated by greedy wife and evil voodoo priest, ends up, along with most of the cast, slain. What was needed was a play with the excitement and drama of Voodoo Macbeth, but one that might also offer up an empowering image of black life that could be celebrated beyond the confines of the theatre. And William Dubois's Haiti, staged under a triumvirate of black Negro Unit directors, offered just this opportunity. Haiti Following the success of Macbeth, Houseman and Welles left to set up their own unit, while in Harlem, the Negro Unit was reorganized. The director Carlton Moss became Managing Project Supervisor, Harry Edwards, the West Indian intellectual, was put in charge of administra- tion, while Gus Smith, an actor, playwright, and director became manag- ing producer with some authority over choice of plays.47 Although the Negro Unit was now under black leadership, this did not mean that African Americans had control of programming; Smith and his team read and recommended plays, but it was the New York City Planning Board, under Federal Director George K.ondulf, which made final deci- sions on the repertoire. Consisting of an entirely white membership, the 46 ''A Survey of the WPA Negro Theatre in New York City," in " Press Releases of the Department of Information," RG69, Box 533, NA. 47 Philip W Barber to All Project Supervisors and Heads of Departments, 17 August 1936. New Deal Agencies and Black America in the 1930s (NDABA) (Frederick, ~ . i l l : University Publications of America, 1984), Reel 25. For more information on Moss, Edward, and Smith see Bernard L. Peterson Jr., Ear!J Black Plqy11m"ghts and Dramatic Writers: A Biographical Directory and Catalog of Plqys, Films and Broadcasting Scripts (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1990). 100 DoSSETr Planning Board consistently assigned white producers to manage black productions. This failure to assign black directors and produce black- authored plays led such groups as the Negro Arts Committee to demand black representation on the Planning Board as necessary to realizing a truly black theatre. 4 B The response by FTP officials to these and other complaints reveal how the FTP management's desire to create communi- ty theatres was always tempered, and frequently contradicted, by a pater- nalistic belief that FTP administrators were better qualified to judge what constituted good black drama. For example, in response to criticism of the repertoire by the editor of the black journal, Opportuni!J 1 Hallie Flanagan insisted "We have always consulted with our Negro group as to choice of plays." This kind of response reinforced black FTP workers' sense that though FTP officials were willing to consult communities, they were not prepared to relinquish the necessary responsibility into the hands of those community theatres and black directors who could create a truly black theatre.49 It is not entirely clear who was ultimately responsible for choos- ing Haiti as a Harlem Negro Unit production. NSB play readers recom- mended it as "full of color and action," ''A roaring melodrama," with "background and material [which] will always have a strong appeal to Negro audiences." 50 The New York City Project, which in March 1937 was taken under the direct command of Flanagan, had been on the look- out for such a play for some time. The same month she moved her head- quarters to New York, Flanagan met with the black directors of the Negro Unit to agree on a strategy for choosing plays. In a memo to her secretary she recorded the plan: "(1) of one series of revivals, such as The 48 Department of Information "WPA Negro Theatre," 21 December 1937, 4, in "Correspondence of Hallie Flanagan," RG69, Box 41, NA; "Negro Arts Committee Brief," 1939, General Correspondence of the National Office, RG69, NA. The NAC rep- resented among others the NAACP, The Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, The Southern Negro Youth Congress, NNC, Urban Leagues, International Workers Order and the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History. 4 9 Opportrmi!J XVII Ganuary 1939): 15; Hallie Flanagan to Elmer Anderson Carter, 27 January 1939. RG69, NA. Emphasis mine. Also see Fraden, Bluepn.nt fora Black Federal Theatre, 198-199. For further evidence of FTP officials' desire to consult the black community while controlling the frameworks and participants in that consultation see National Service Bureau to its "List of Representative Negro Citizens" requesting their views on the Negro Unit's repertoire in order to avoid future "misunderstandings" n.d., Administrative Records, Box 114, FTP-LOC. 50 "Haiti," National Service Bureau review, New Plays Survey, Box 26, FTP- LOC. COMMEMORATING HAITI ON THE l-iARLEM STAGE 101 Show-Off, of sure fire entertainment previously done in the white theatre; and (2) one series of the best negro plays which they can find from their own dramatists; (3) an occasional big spectacle, to be directed by Houseman, or Walker Hart, or some white director whom they choose."St Since Macbeth, the Negro Unit had presented a black-authored play, Turpentine, which was co-authored by Gus Smith (one of the Unit's directors) and was a moderate success. It was followed by a series of poorly attended white-authored plays, culminating in the spectacularly unsuccessful production of O'Neill's S. S. Glencairn in the autumn of 1937.52 Having tried options 1 and 2, perhaps the New York Planning Board and Negro Unit directors decided it was time for a spectacle that might replicate the success of Macbeth, but also reengage its Harlem con- stituency following the failure of the O'Neill sea plays. The Amsterdam News certainly interpreted the decision to stage a play on Haiti as a posi- tive response to the growing demand within Harlem for a drama relevant to black life. Attracting Harlemites to the Lafayette was, the newspaper claimed, "the sole motivation behind the ultimate selection of 'Haiti.' Broadway was ignored. Every other demand, the predilections of every group of theatrical force outside of Harlem was brushed aside to assure the production of Harlem's type of play."53 It was in this context that the Negro Unit put on another white- authored play under another white director, but on a "black" theme. Maurice Clark, who had directed theatre in the Experimental and Children's Units was assigned to direct William Dubois's Haiti. In an interview many years later, Clark offered his version of how and why William Dubois's play was chosen. Describing Dubois as "a southerner, a real southern Cracker" who got himself excited about miscegenation, 51 Hallie Flanagan to Mrs. Woodward, 4 March 1937, "General Correspondence of the National Office 1935-39," RG69, Box 32, NA. 52 O'Neill's sea plays attracted 7,884 audience members, of which 5,802 paid for their tickets. This low figure was surpassed only by Horse Pft:y, which had figures of 5,355, over fewer performances. Since Macbeth, only George Kell y's The Sho1v Off was a box office hit with attendance figures of 96,048, but 79,048 of these were free. Turpentine managed 23,791 over 62 performances, but no other play managed to attract more than 16,000 until Haiti. See "Negro Productions at the Lafayette Theatre," New York Project Correspondence, RG69, Box 533, NA; Gus Smith Report, 22 March 1938, and I. Vinton's report on audience reaction, both in "Correspondence from the New York Ciry Office," RG69, Box 498, NA. 53 "Lafayette Incident Rebuke to Cultural Pride of Community," Amsterdam News, 4 June 1938, Vassar College Collection of Programs and Promotion Materials, RG69, Box 148, NA. 102 Clark made central his own role in transforming the script: A play had been kicking around among the directors and no one wanted it. It was called Haiti .... Well it wasn't a good play, but the idea that such a theme was to go untouched I just couldn't take. So I called the playwright up to my apartment. I said, "Look, this play should be done in Harlem, but if it is done in Harlem, I can tell you one thing. They will come right over the footlights and tear us to pieces. But," I said, ' 'We can make a play out of this that they will love." And so we went to work, and we rewrote this play from top to bottom. Each day he thought I had finished work, but each day he came by with a new version and I had another one for him. And on and on from top to bottom, this was practically a new play. It was about the victorious Haitian republic over the greatest army that had ever been in existence. 54 DoSSF.IT In exchange for transforming Dubois's play, Clark admits to agreeing to Dubois's request that black and white actors would not touch each other on the stage, although he presented a mixed curtain cau.ss Clark's recol- lections have often been used to explain the transformation of Dubois's play. But in relying only on Clark's testimony we ignore the appetite for investing in t heatre as a platform for social change which Harlem activists had developed over several decades. A study of black community engage- ment with the production suggests that it was black-directed memory work that reshaped a white-authored, white-directed play into a celebra- tion of successful black resistance to white rule. 56 In tracing the evolution of the production we need to examine the different versions of the script, the role of black critics and community in shaping the production, 54 Maurice and Helen Fisher Clark, interviewed by John O'Connor, 7 August 1976. Los Angeles, California. Revised by interviewee January, 1979. Tape 1, Side 1-2, Theatre of the Thirties Oral History Collection, Special Collections & Archives, George Mason University (Hereafter OHC). 55 Additional statement by Maurice Clark, in letter dated 6 January 1979, OHC. 56 Several accounts credit Maurice Clark with the transformation of Haiti including John O'Connor and Lorraine Brown, Free, Adult & Uncensored The Federal Theatre Prqject (Washington: New Republic Books, 1978), 118-9, Mary Renda, Taking Haiti, 296; for the development of a community for social change around Harlem's Little Theatres see Macki, "Reconstructing Community and Identity," especially 107-18. COMMEMORATING HAITI ON THE HARLEM STAGE 103 as well as the political use to which black political groups put Haiti in order to refashion it as a lieu de memoire capable of serving the political needs of the present. Harlem knew that Haitian heroes were coming to visit in the spring of 1938. In the weeks leading up to the official opening of Haiti, black newspapers nationally paid close attention to the progress of rehearsals, informing readers of casting decisions, the secret marriage of its star Rex Ingram who would play the leading role, Christophe, and explaining why black Americans should be interested in contemporary political developments in Haiti.57 It was also reported that cast members had been coached in the early history of Haiti by Arthur Schomburg, col- lector, historian, and historiographer of black life, and that his lectures had emphasized the courage and heroism of Toussaint and Christophe. sa While some black newspapers were still confused as to whether William Dubois was their very own W. E. B. Du Bois, the Amsterdam Ne1vs, which had taken great interest in the Unit since its inception, cast doubt on the capacity of a white playwright to render effectively a drama of black resistance. On 26 February, the editor published a letter of complaint to FTP headquarters written by one of their readers, Harold Williams. Having attended a preview performance of Haiti, Williams felt compelled to express his dismay at the characterization of black manhood he found in Dubois's play. Claiming ownership of Haiti's history and culture for himself and the black community, Williams explained: "Because of our knowledge of the Haitian Revolution my friends and I believe the play did not correctly represent the spirit of Haiti. We think Mr. Dubois (of the New York Times Dramatic Department) is prejudiced in his outlook: in that he misrepresents the Blacks."S9 Williams's criticisms were aimed specifically at the characterization and plot offered by the script, rather than actors' interpretations of roles. Toussaint, he complained, was wrongly treated as a common soldier rather as the Governor-General of Haiti: "the treatment given him in the play is a concoction typical of the American attitude toward Negroes." Moreover, Williams and his friends 57 "Haiti Cast Completed," Pittsburgh Courier, 12 February 1938, 21; "Haiti Will Open Late in February," Afro American, 12 February 1938, 11; "Rex Ingram Secretly Marries Francienc Everette," Amsterdam News, 19 February 1938; 1; "Defender Sends Aid to Haiti," Chicago Defender, 5 February 1938, 4. 58 Al Monroe, "Harlem WPA Players Hear Haiti's Early Tilt: Arthur Schomburg, Ace Curator, Ably Discusses Islanders;' Chicago Defender, 5 February 1938, 16; 'Schomburg Addresses WPA Players on Haiti," New Jounzal and Guide, 5 February 1938, 18. 59 "Technique of Play Flayed by Reader," Amsterdam News, 26 February 1938, 19. 104 D OSSETI believed that Christophe was similarly represented through the sneering eyes of whites: "Christophe" he complained, "gives more the appearance of a well-bred house servant, than a mature, shrewd man capable of lead- ing a people." He was also contemptuous of the errant storyline that sin- gled out Odette, the mixed race French woman who did not reveal her knowledge of Haitian spies, as being critical to the success of the Haitian revolution.60 Although the Amsterdam News does not appear to follow up on this story, the same edition included a WPA press release claiming that the postponed opening was due to the difficulty in procuring period fur- niture. In the weeks that followed, the Afro American printed two articles which reported the widely held belief that the delayed operung was a result of the less than enthusiastic previews: Although no official statement has been given out, it is reported that adverse criticism given the play by a group of pre-viewers, is responsible. Critics obj ected to the characterization given Toussaint L'Ouverture by William Dubois, white, who authored the play .... It is being reported that the play is being mended and smoothed frantically during these days of waiting.61 Repeating this claim in a foll ow up article, the Afro American suggested that Dubois's original play had not done justice to the bravery of Haitians and changes had to be made accordingly.62 There are three extant versions of the script, with subtle differ- ences which could support the Afro American's claims. The first, publica- tion number 50-S, was prepared by the FTP and published for 50 cents in April 1938. A second version appeared later that year in a Random House publication, Federal Theatre Plqys. Finally, there is what appears to be an unpublished and undated version which has been catalogued at the FTP collection at George Mason as the "Revised Edition."63 Although it 60 Ibid. 61 "Opening of 'Haiti' Play Postponed," Amsterdam News, 26 February 1938, 16; "Opening of Haiti postponed," Afro-American, 5 March 1938, 11. 62 "Rex I ngram is Applauded for his work in 'Haiti,"' Afro American, 12 March 1938, 10. 63 Federal Theatre Project, Federal Theatre Plqys (New York: Random House, 1938), hereafter RHS. Publication number 50-S (hereafter PS 50-S) and the "Revised Edition" (hereafter RE) are both available in the Federal Theatre Playscript and Radioscript Collection, Special Collections and Archives, George Mason Universiry, Box 2. COMMEMORATING HAITI ON THE HARLEM STAGE. 105 is unclear which version was used in production, as there is no director's report for Haiti or clearly definable working script, all three could be ren- dered sympathetic to the Haitian revolution in production. Indeed, the three scripts are identical for much of the play. Set in Haiti in 1802 after the slaves have rebelled and killed their slave masters, the island is gov- erned by Toussaint L'Ouverture. The play opens with Toussaint and Christophe contemplating the arrival of the French army, led by Napoleon's brother-in-law, General Leclerc, who has come to Haiti to re- establish French control over the island and reimpose slavery. Under Toussaint's direction and with the reluctant compliance of his second-in- command, Henri Christophe, the Haitians retreat to the hills, but refuse to surrender. The French capture Toussaint through trickery but are final- ly forced to flee when Christophe, now the Haitian leader, leads a heroic expedition down from the hills which overwhelms the invaders. Important sub-plots include a romance, a father's search for his long-lost daughter, and a case of mistaken racial identity on the part of an appar- ently "white" French woman Odette, who is married to a malevolent French Colonel, but who has instinctive sympathy for the Haitians due to her mixed race heritage. Although neither Odette nor her French com- patriots know it, Odette is the product of a love affair between a Haitian slave, Jacques, and the white wife of his slave master. The complaint of the preview attendee suggests that it was Odette's character that had orig- inally been used by the playwright to illustrate the dangers of miscegena- tion.M Odette's failure to tell her husband that Jacques and Christophe have been spying on their headquarters is one (of several) factors leading to Haitian victory. If a production presented Odette as the "tragic mulat- ta" is it easy to see how this play could have gone down the route of Griffith's Birth of a Nation: interracial sex leads to mixed race progeny, mixed loyalties, and consequently is a step toward disastrous black rule. However, the response of the black community to the play in the spring of 1938 suggests they saw a version in which the heroism of Toussaint and Christophe took centre stage. Although all three scripts would allow for a heroic reading, there are subtle variations between them which suggest that the so-called Revised Edition may have been the script used in production, following revisions made in response to community pressure. We can assume that the Random House version and the FrP Publication 50-S received the consent of the author and in fact these two versions are the most alike. The Revised Edition however seems to contain some variations in char- 64 "Technique of Play Flayed by Reader," Amsterdnm News, 26 February 1938, 19. 106 DOSSETT acterization which Dubois (if his character references are to be believed) would have been unlikely to condone and a Harlem audience likely to love. \'\!hen one examines the three versions of the play, one may find some textual evidence to support the Afro American's claims that Haiti had to be amended. In the Revised Edition, Toussaint appears less naive and Christophe steelier than in the Random House and FfP publications, suggesting that this version may have been rewritten in response to pre- view audience criticism. In all three versions, Toussaint is cautious and has patience enough to retreat to the hills to wait and see whether the French come in peace, or, as his colleagues suspect, to reimpose slavery and French control on the island. In the published scripts Toussaint asks Christophe: "Did you think I'd give up all we won together? First I will taste General Leclerc's 'abundance-and-peace' from a safe distance." In the Revised Edition, although Toussaint takes the same course, an addi- tional phrase is inserted, in which Toussaint seems to explicitly reject charges of naivety: "Did you think I'd give up all we won together-/ike a trusting schoolbqy? "65 In the Revised Edition, Christophe is more blood- thirsty and without mercy for his enemy. Although there is no mention of it in the published scripts, in the Revised Edition, Christophe noncha- lantly recalls the massacre of white slaveholders, reflecting that Odette's white mother left Haiti just in time, "We made a clean sweep of the Moreaus."66 Later in act 2, Christophe's black nationalism and race pride is made more prominent. Informing Odette that he has killed her odious husband, Christophe declares: "There can be no truce between black blood and white." Christophe also introduces himself in the Revised Edition as the Governor of Northern Haiti and "the . first of the blacks."67 These subtle changes may have been a response to Harold Williams's charge that Christophe appeared in previews as more a "well- bred house servant, than a mature, shrewd man capable of leading a peo- ple." Further evidence to support the contention that the Revised Edition may have been the working script is suggested by the clear expla- nations offered in place of technical terms, presumably to ensure the script's meaning could be understood by the widest possible audience. For example, in all three scripts, Christophe comments wryly on the indulgent accessories-including women that the French have brought 6 5 Act 1, Scene 1, RE, 5; PS 50-S, 4; RHS, 7. Additions in italics. 66 Act 1, Scene 1, RE, 9. 67 Act 1, Scene 2, RE, 37, 43. COMMEMORATING HAITI ON THE H ARLEM STAGE 107 Figure 1: Alvin Childress as J acgues, Louis Sharpe as Toussaint L'Ouverture and Rex Ingram as Henri Christophe in Haiti, Act 1, Scene 1. Box 1177, Federal Theatre Project Collection, Music Division, Library of Congress, Washington, DC. on their mission to retake Haiti. But whereas in the two published scripts Christophe dismisses French excess, "a little Tuileries-on QQI island!" in the Revised Edition, this likely unfamiliar reference to the royal French pleasure garden, is made meaningful by a preceding phrase, "Lace, Lackeys, gold chairs," adding to the characterization of the French as arrogant, indulgent, and distracted by luxury even during war.68 Which of the three scripts was presented on 2 March and sub- sequent nights is difficult to ascertain with any certainty. What is clear is that while there were reservations about the previews, the show that opened at the Lafayette on 2 March was one that many community lead- ers and local newspapers could embrace. Harlem audiences witnessed black male characters in positions of power, who did not feel compelled to strip to a loin cloth in the manner of Brutus Jones, nor succumb to the powers of voodoo, but who were instead restrained, in control, and polit- ically successful. They also had the opportunity to watch Ingram, the star of the movie version of Green Pastures, play Christophe, a rugged and dar- ing character who never loses control (although he does lose his shirt in 68 Act 1, Scene 1: RE, 5; PS 50-S, 5; RHS, 8. Another example occurs in Act 2, when Odette notices her would-be lover Duval's promotion to Colonel. In the published versions, Odette says "l see new epaulettes" while in the Revised version she makes ref- erence to "more braid on the sleeve." Act 2, Scene 1, RE, 17; PS 50-S, 17; RHS, 46. 108 DOSSETT Figure 2: Rex Ingram as Henri Christophe, Box 1177, Federal Theatre Project Collection, Music Division, Library of Congress, Washington, DC. the heat of the battle). Toussaint, played by Louis Sharpe is wise, weary and diplomatic, while Alvin Childress, who played Jacques, was singled out by critics for his controlled performance.69 By contrast, the French soldiers are savage and unmanly: they send their inferiors into dangerous battles to settle grievances over women and are constantly imbibing cognac and rum to keep up their courage. As the director Clark later recalled, "Haiti broke the pattern of unequal black and white parts and even made the black parts dominate. It dared to show that blacks could create a nation of their own with a superior culture and the courage to defend themselves."70 Certainly black reviewers thought so. Leading the praise for Haiti, the Amsterdam News found it "Brilliantly staged, excellently acted and enthusiastically received." Its exuberant response to the first night was such that it declared itself prepared to overlook Haill's historical inaccuracies in favor of its general inspirational feel: "That the play departs from the bounds of actual history is of little moment. The result 69 "Brilliance Reigns at Haiti Opening," Amsterdam News, 12 March 1938, 16; "Role Lauded" Pittsburg/; Courier, 11 June 1938, 20. 70 Additional Statement by Maurice Clark, in letter dated 6 January 1979, OHC. COMI\IEMORATING HAITI ON THE HARLEM STAGE 109 Figure 3: Rex Ingram Posing as Henri Christophe. Box 1177, Federal Theatre Project Collection, Music Division, Library of Congress, Washington, DC. is as stupendous as any production ground out by Hollywood cameras and upholds the WPA federal theatre tradition of prodigious accom- plishment."71 The Atlanta Dai!J World agreed, calling it "The finest play produced in New York City in recent years."72 Perhaps partly because of Haiti's casual disregard for historical accuracy (as one newspaper pointed out, it was Dessalines, rather than Christophe, who proclaimed Haitian independence in 1804), once in production black commentators spent less time commenting on details of the production itself but rather played a proactive role in determining and interpreting the meaning of Haiti for black Americans through the promotion of Haiti related events.73 Black newspapers advertised and organized Haitian themed events which drew on the interest generated by the production. For example, to coincide with the anticipated February opening of Haiti, a special Haitian evening was held on 23 February which included talks by 7 1 "Brilliance Reigns at Haiti Opening," Amsterdam News, 12 March 1938, 16. 72 Alvin Moses, "Footlight Flickers," Atlanta Daify World, 21 March 1938, 2. 73 ''Technique of Play Flayed by Reader," Amsterdam News, 26 February 1938, 19. 110 Doss Err Arthur Schomburg, as well as members of the cast, Ingram and Sharpe, and Laura Bowman and her husband Leroy Antoine performing the Haitian music they had composed and arranged for the production.7 4 Indeed, both individually and as a group, the Haiti cast played an impor- tant role in translating past struggles into present day concerns. The entire Haiti cast was presented at a benefit to raise money for black art, hosted by the Negro People's Art Committee, whose leading members overlapped with those of the cast, including president Rex Ingram, and vice-president Add Bates.?S The cast also frequently appeared at Schomburg's seminars and public lectures on Haiti between February and May 1938,76 Schomburg himself appeared at nearly every public Haitian event during the run of the production, and also curated a special exhi- bition of his collection at the 135th Street library which featured a num- ber of Haitian artifacts including the signatures of Toussaint, Christophe, and Dessalines. Proselytizing for the exhibition, the Amsterdam News pro- claimed it even more exciting than the play. 7 7 Headlines on the Negro Unit's latest offering such as "Heroes of Haiti Live again," and "Toussaint L'Ouverture Comes to Life," are indica- tive of the emphasis black newspapers placed on the contemporary rele- vance of Haiti's past to black AmericansJS Their coverage of the play often extended to lengthy discussions on history of the Haitian revolu- tion and the key figures that readers would encounter in the play. For example, the Atlanta Dai!J World lamented the fact that Toussaint L'Ouverture had for too long been "neglected by school books and heretofore ignored as material for the drama" but celebrated that "Now that he has been immortalized in the stirring drama by William Du Bois [sic], intelligent members of the Negro race everywhere are clamoring for more information about L'Ouverture." 79 This connection between the 7 4 "Haiti Opens February 23," Amsterdam News, 19 February 1938, 16. '5 "For Art's Sake," Amsterdam NelliS, 19 March 1938, 8. 76 Schomburg particularly stressed the "courage and heroism" of Toussaint and Christophe. See "Schomburg Addresses WPA Players on Haiti," New Journal & Guide, 5 February 1938, 18. 77 "Library Exhibition on Haiti Matchless," Amsterdam News, 7 I\ fay 1938, 13. 78 "Heroes of Haiti Live again in WPA Theatre," Afro American, 12 March 1938, 12; "Heroes of Haiti Live Again in WPA Theatre Play 'Haiti,"' New Journal & Guide, 12 February 1938, 16. 79 "WPA's Haiti Recalls Famous Speech by Wendell Phillips," Atlanta Daify World, 6 June 1938, 3. (OMli!EMOR.\TING HAITI ON THF. HARLEM STAGE 111 staging of Haiti at the Lafayette and the importance of Haiti's founding heroes for black Americans was made most explicit by the FfP spon- sored "Haiti Week in Harlem." Commencing on 31 May, the week opened with a pageant to commemorate the coronation of "the liberator of Haiti." According to a WPA press release: The pageant will start as "royal procession" from the corner of 125th Street and Seventh Avenue, and will march to the accompaniment of Haitian ceremonial music to the Lafayette Theatre, with Rex Ingram and a guard of honor leading the parade. The procession will end on the stage of the Lafayette Theatre and, supple- mented by a program of music and the presence of many Haitian and Harlem notables, the actual corona- tion scene will be enacted. Everyone is welcome to attend. Among the speakers will be Dr. Binga Dismond and Dr. Arthur A. Schomburg, well-known authorities on Haiti and its dramatic history.so During Haiti week, Haitian girls were to visit Mayor La Guardia to invite him to the coronation, while "Sound trucks will cruise the streets of Harlem" to announce "the coming coronation of Christophe, the man who ran Napoleon's armies off the islands and brought about the com- plete independence of Haiti." The week's festivities ended with a cele- bration of the 135th anniversary of the birth of Toussaint on 5 June, sponsored by the National Negro Congress.81 Described by the Amsterdam News as a "tremendous success," the closing ceremony took place on the stage of the Lafayette and included speeches from the heroes of the current production including Rex Ingram and Louis Sharpe. Wendell Phillips's often-quoted tribute to Toussaint was read out, and Richard B. Moore, the influential Barbadian Communist, delivered an address.8 2 Attendees included representatives of the Haitian consulate, the American Friends of the Haitian People, the New York Association for the Study of Negro Life and History, the NAACP, the Brotherhood 80 Press Release, 20 May 1938, in ''Vassar College Collection," RG69, Box 148, NA. 81 Ibid. 82 "L'Ouverture Memorial Attracts at Lafayette," Amsterdam News, 11 June 1938, 9A. 112 00SSETf of Sleeping Car Porters, the church, and of course the National Negro Congress.s3 On these and other similar events, black columnists insisted that the history of Haiti needed protecting from white authored narra- tives out to steal their black past. The commemoration of the Haitian revolution served as bulwark in this endeavor; it reminded black Americans and Haitians of their shared heritage and offered a correction to the dominant narrative that justified U.S. invasion and fostered white cultural exploitation of an independent black state. Political leaders also found the production of Haiti a valuable prop in connecting the Haitian past with the African American present. Describing the production as "far superior to Macbeth," Adam Clayton Powell Jr.-the prominent civil rights activist and pastor of Harlem's Abyssinian Baptist Church-used his regular column in the Amsterdam News to urge Harlemites to see Haiti immediately. Black audiences, he said, would get "a strange thrill in that last act when the Haitian masses, led by Christophe, sweep down from the hills through the French line and establish their freedom."B 4 Powell made a direct link between those black men and women who found strength and courage to resist the Napoleons of the past and those who would struggle against fascism and Hitler in the present: "In this hour, when the borders of liberty are becoming increasingly narrow and the frontiers of freedom are receding, it is inspiring to note that there were once raggedy fellow blacks as who were able to rise up and crush Napoleon's best. As long as this spirit is free in the world, the Napoleons and Hitlers are not to be feared." Powell went on to lament the lack of men and women prepared to "risk their all in the eternal fight for liberty" expressing particular criticism for Austria's failure to stand up to Nazi Germany and the persecution of a local Communist by the American legion and the Catholic church. 8 5 Linking the history of Haitian resistance not only to contemporary black strug- gles, but also to the production itself, Powell suggested that black Americans had a duty to see the play and study the forces that led to the self emancipation of black slaves. Others used the production to focus special attention on Haiti's ongoing struggle to resist subordination both at the hands of the U.S. and also the American supported Rafael Trujillo, authoritarian leader of the 83 "Patriot to be Commemorated: Toussaint L'Ouverrure l\feering, June 5," Amsterdam News, 4 June 1938, 20. 84 Adam Clayton Powell Jr., "Soapbox," Amsterdam News, 19 March 1938, 13. 85Jbid. HAITI ON THE H t\RLEM STJ\GE 113 Figure 4: "Finale of Haiti, the play by William Dubois which the Federal Theatre will present at the Copley Theatre beginning on Oct. 24th." Box 1177, Federal Theatre Project Collection, Music Division, Library of Congress, Washington, DC. neighboring Dominican Republic. There was extensive coverage in the black press of the Dominican Republican Army's massacre of Haitians in October 1937 and the negotiations which led to the payment by the Dominican of a $750,000 indemnity.B6 Attention was also paid to groups beyond the U.S. and Haiti who were campaigning for black freedom on a global scale. For example, the Chicago Defender gave prominent coverage to the founding meeting of the International African Service Bureau in London and its new manifesto which explained the symbolic impor- tance of Haiti and Liberia, "the only states where to be black is not a stigma ... an example of the capacity of Africans and peoples of African descent to govern themselves."87 All of this activity meant that when rumors circulated that Haiti was to be taken over by a commercial theatre company and moved to 86 "Haitians Killed by Dominicans," Pittsburgh Courier, 30 October 1937, 24; "5000 Slaughtered in San Domingo," Amsterdam News, 13 November 1937, 1; "Haiti Mobilizes Troops Along Frontier," Chicago Defender, 20 November 1937, 24; "Dominican Republic Must Pay for Haitian Loss," Philadelphia Tribune, 3 February 1938, 3. 8 7 "London Blacks in Appeal for Haiti, Liberia," Chicago Defender, 21 May 1938, 24. 114 DOSSETT Broadway, many black Americans saw it as part of the same struggle: just as Haitians had struggled for their liberty first from the French, then the Americans, and now from the machete-wielding Dominican army, black Americans now had to resist white attempts to control Haiti's past. As part of that struggle, Harlemites would fight to keep Haiti. Beginning in June 1938, Negro Unit workers, theatre unions, black newspapers, and political and civic organizations orchestrated an intensive campaign to prevent Haiti from being moved downtown. They feared (not unreason- ably, given the repeated FTP cuts and reorganizations that had begun in 1937) that any decision to leave the Lafayette dark that summer might be a prelude to the permanent closure of the Harlem federal theatre. On 24 June, these diverse groups came together at a mass meeting at the Harlem YMCA to build a campaign to keep the Lafayette open and fight racial discrimination in the FTP. "Outstanding leaders" lending their support included Langston Hughes and playwright and actor Frank Wilson, as well as Richard Moore and Adam Clayton Powell. Leaders of the New York Harlem YMCA, Negro Labor Committee, and National Negro Congress committed to using their resources to ensure that the theatre would not be closed down, even for the summer. To mobilize the com- munity, pickets were organized outside the Lafayette, with signs calling on Harlemites to "help us in our fight to save your community theatre," and promising "your support will help us save" it. Others declared, "we protest the liquidation of the Negro theatre," and "our productions not only entertain but educate, see Haiti."88 This protest made the front page of the Amsterdam News which had been campaigning throughout June to keep Haiti in Harlem. The paper suggested that higher black attendance figures (it estimated that less than 20,000 of the 74,000 who attended Haiti were black, although there is no evidence to support these figures) were required in order to ensure the production stayed at the Lafayette.89 The paper took a particularly strong stand, suggesting that the people of Harlem were responsible th"rough their attendance for keeping "what is justly Harlem's own, the culture that has its only rightful home in Harlem," and lamenting that those "actors, directors and technical experts, who have worked so hard to build a substantial Negro theatre in 88 "Fight Moving of Lafayette," Amsterdam News, 25 June 1938, 1. 89 "Weekly Topics," Amsterdam News, 15 June 1938; "Lafayette Incident Rebuke to Cultural Pride of Community," Amsterdam NeJJJs, 4 June 1938, Vassar College Collection of Programs and Promotion Materials 1935-1939. See also "Harlem Will Get Work: WPA Theatre Promises," Afro American, 16 July 1938, which suggested that the play had been moved to Broadway because of greater chances of white patronage. COMMEMORATING HAJTI ON THE HARLEM STAGE 115 Figure 5: Poster advertising the Harlem Negro Unit's production of Haiti at the Lafayette, New York City (1938). Box 1144, Federal Theatre Project Collection, Music Division, Library of Congress, Washington, DC. Harlem, must go outside Harlem for their reward."90 The Amsterdam News's view that Haiti and a permanent black the- atre could be theirs forever, if only more black Americans attended more performances, may have offered an empowering sense that the fate of Haiti/ Haiti lay in black hands, thereby contributing to a growing sense of Haiti as an important lieu de memo ire. In reality, the fate of Haiti was decid- ed by factors beyond the community's control. The rising cost of the Lafayette's rent, the need to renegotiate the lease, and the uncertainty over the Negro Unit's future due to nation-wide budget cuts all shaped Haitls fate.9J Hallie Flanagan defended the decision to move Haiti from the Lafayette as a temporary closure, due to a desire to "draw in new audiences" to Haiti on Broadway. Certainly there was both ambition and precedent within the FfP for moving popular shows around the country to enable as many Americans as possible to see a successful production. 90 "Lafayette Incident Rebuke to Cultural Pride of Community," Amsterdam News, 4 June 1938, Vassar College Collection of Programs and Promotion Materials 1935- 1939. 91 "Haiti May Return to Lafayette," Pittsburgh Courier, 8 October 1938, 20. 116 DOSSETT Figure 6: Poster advertising the Copley Theatre production of Haiti, Boston, (1938). Box 1144, Federal Theatre Project Collection, Music Division, Library of Congress, Washington, DC. To put it in perspective, Macbeth had played for ten weeks at the Lafayette before going downtown to the Adelphi and then on tour. Haiti had already run uptown for nineteen weeks. 92 No official records were kept of the racial make up of the audiences that saw Haiti, but whether they were predominantly black or white, the play's long run at the Lafayette made it the biggest hit in the Harlem Unit's history. The white critics who attended early on in the run commented on the predominantly black audiences and we know that throughout the run, Haiti continued to attract group bookings from black associations and organizations includ- ing the Harlem Cultural Club and the West Harlem Community Council.93 Perhaps black attendance did diminish over the course of the run, or perhaps some African Americans fighting for a black theatre 92 Hallie Flanagan, letter to Cecelia Cabaniss Saunders, Executive Secretary 137th Street YWCA, 9 August 1936, NDABA, Reel 24; Department of Jnformation "WPA Negro Theatre," 21 December 1937,4, in "Correspondence of Hallie Flanagan," RG69, Box 41, NA. 9 3 "The Theatre," Wall Street Journal, 5 March 1938, 2. Also see footnote 2; "Haiti Passes Macbeth Record," Amsterdam Ne1vs, 19 March 1938, 19; "44,000 Have Seen Haiti: Advance Sale is 50,000," Chicago Defender, 7 May 1938. COM..t"lEMORATING HAITI ON THE H_-\RLEM STAGE 117 would have found anything less than an entirely black audience insuffi- cient. Haiti ran for a record 103 performances at the Lafayette where it was seen by an estimated 74,000 New Yorkers before moving downtown to Daly's on 11 July. Black newspapers further removed from Harlem pol- itics such as the Atlanta Daify World welcomed the opportunity for plays addressing serious black issues to be performed before white as well as black audiences, suggesting that: "Broadway get over its scare-phobia as to how 'NEGROPHOBES' might receive this mighty spectacle of .. . BLACK ISLAND DOMINANCE ... and give 'Milky Way' theatre-goers an opportunity to view some grand acting." Whites, they suggested, might even benefit from seeing "plays where blacks gain dominance over whites ... physically or mentally as the case may be."94 In October, fol- lowing the Broadway run, the troupe took the production to Boston for a short tour, playing at the same time as the Hartford Negro Unit, who were presenting their own four-night run of Dubois's drama.9S When Haitt's run finally came to an end that autumn, black groups lamented its loss and questioned the motives for its discontinuance. The Colored Actors and Performers Association sent a strongly-worded telegram to the DC headquarters: We being necessarily interested in the advancement and development of Negro culture, see in the success of the Federal Theatre Productions "Haiti" the interpretative means towards realizing our objectives. Protesting there- fore the unfair closing of Haiti we classify such tactics as rank discrimination and demand "Haiti" immediate reopening to continue this successful run.96 They were informed by Flanagan's secretary that Haitt's long run in Harlem and Broadway, followed by a two-week tour in Boston had final- ly "exhausted" the audience for such a play as reflected in the "falling off 94 Alvin Moses, "Footlight Flickers" Philadelphia Tribune, 17 March 1938, 14; Moses, "Footlight Flickers," Atlanta Dai!J World, 21 March 1938, 2. 95 O'Connor and Brown, Free, Adult & Uncensored, 118; "Final Performance of Haiti Tonight at Avery Memorial," Hartford Courant, 29 October 1938, 5; "Two Plays Ending Runs Here Tonight," New York Times, 9 July 1938, 10. 96 Colored Actors and Performers Association to Ellen Woodward, Assistant Administrator WPA, 15 November 1938, NDABA, Reel24. 118 D OSSETf in attendance."9 7 The FrP's decision to close the play was no doubt encouraged by the fact that in July 1938, Haiti had been singled out by Congressman J. Parnell Thomas as a play with "communistic leanings." A member of the Dies Committee created by the House of Representatives to investigate un-American and subversive activities in ali WPA projects, Thomas's charge may have revealed more about New Deal opponents' willingness to use charges of communism to protect racial segregation, than how Haiti was performed and received, but it was indicative of the threats faced by the FTP which would lead to its closure in 1939.98 By serving as a focal point for black public engagement with Haiti's past and its relationship to the black American present, the Negro Unit's production marked an important moment in American theatre his- tory. It showed that a black theatre (even one with white oversight, and too often, white playwrights and directors) could serve as a medium for black expression and protest, that black Americans were producers as well as consumers of art, and that through theatre they could disrupt dominant ideas about black masculinity. The FTP offered a real oppor- tunity to develop black theatre, because its mandate and structures did, however imperfectly, engage with the audiences and communities whose tax dollars supported it. Harlem's residents and civic leaders recognized the opportunity-it was why they invested heavily in their Negro Unit and fought so hard to keep it. The Harlem branch of the Young Women's Christian Association lent out its auditorium and dressing rooms for the rehearsal of new plays, while its director Cecelia Cabaniss Saunders played a prominent role in the campaign to keep Haiti in Harlem. Insisting that the Negro Unit was an important part of Harlem's cultur- al and political life, Saunders explained in a letter to Hallie Flanagan that the Negro Unit offered Harlemites an experience Broadway never could, "not only because of the prices charged, but because so many of the peo- ple are called upon to work very late and it would be impossible for them to cover the long distance necessary to come home, get dressed for atten- dance at a play, and then go back down town in time for the show." Shows like Haiti she insisted "must be presented in our own communi- ty." The FTP enabled African Americans who had never experienced the- atre to attend their first productions, transform those productions, and 9 7 Ellen S. Woodward to Colored Actors and Performer Association, 17 November 1935, NDABA, Reel 24. 98 "Theatre Project Faces an Inquiry," New York Times, 27 July 1938, 19. The FTP became an early target for the Dies Committee, not least because of the FTP's insis- tence on integrated audiences. TITLE 119 make them Harlem's own. "In these days when, 'government for the peo- ple' is something more than a phrase," Haiti suggested that American the- atre need not be an elite leisure pursuit, but a provocative public medium for the negotiation of African Americans' political future. 99 99 Cecelia Cabaniss Saunders, Executive Secretary of the 137th Street YWCA, to Hallie Flanagan, 2 August 1938, NDABA, Reel 24. CONTRIBUTORS Kate Dossett is Lecturer in American History at the University of Leeds, UK. Her book, Bridging Race Divides: Black Nationalism 1 Feminism and Integration in the United States 1 1896-1935 (University Press of Florida, 2008), won the 2009 Julia Cherry Spruill Prize for best book in southern women's history. She is currently working on a second book Stages in the Struggle: Black Theatre and Politics in 1930s America, and has a forthcoming article in African American Review on the staging of Garveyism in Theodore Ward's Big White Fog (1938). Douglas A. Jones, Jr. is a PhD candidate in Drama and Humanities at Stanford University. His primary area of research is nineteenth-century performance and performativity, with particular emphasis on antebellum culture and the history of slavery. His work on the period has also appeared in Theatre Topics. John H. Muse is a PhD candidate at Yale, where he teaches courses on theatre and modernism. John's dissertation, "Short Attention Span Theaters: Modernist Theatrical Shorts Since 1880," explores the under- studied significance of short experimental drama over the last hundred and thirty years. His other research interests include twentieth-century drama, performance studies from ancient to digital, genre-bending, media studies, and early modern drama. Ashis Sengupta is Professor of English at the University of North Bengal (India). Recipient of the Olive I Reddick Award (1995), he has published many articles on modern American and Indian English drama in journals/ edited volumes of international repute. Sengupta was a fellow at the Fulbright American Studies Institute in New York in 2002, a guest lecturer at Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia in 2003, and a visiting Fulbright professor at the Department of English, Rhode Island College, during Fall 2006. He has presented papers at a number of seminars and conferences in India and abroad. Sengupta recently visited Sweden as a SASNET guest professor. MARTIN E. SEGAL THEATRE CENTER PUBLICATIONS Barcelona Plays: A Collection of New Works by Catalan Playwrights Translated and edited by Marion Peter Holt and Sharon G. Feldman The new plays in this collection represent outstanding playwrights of three generations. Benet i Jornet won his first drama award in 1963, when was only twenty-three years old, and in recent decades he has become Catalonia's leading exponent of thematically challeng- ing and structurally inventive theatre. His plays have been performed internationally and translated into four teen languages, including Korean and Arabic. Sergi Belbel and Llu"lsa Cunille arrived on the scene in the late 1980s and early 1990s, with distinctive and provocative dramatic voices. The actor-director-playwright Pau Mir6 is a member of yet another generation that is now attracting favorable critical attention. josep M. Benet I jornet: Two Plays Translated by Marion Peter Holt Josep M. Benet i Jornet, born in Barcelona, is the author of more than forty works for the stage and has been a lead- ing contributor to the striking revitalization of Catalan the- atre in the post-Franco era. Fleeting, a compelling "tragedy-within-a-play," and Stages, with its monological recall of a dead and unseen protagonist, rank among his most important plays. They provide an introduction to a playwright whose inventive experiments in dramatic form and treatment of provocative themes have made him a major figure in contemporary European theatre. Price US$2o.oo each plus shipping ($3 within the USA, $6 international) Please make payments in US dollars payable to : Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Mail Checks or money orders to: The Circulation Manager, Martin E. Segal Theatre Center, The CUNY Graduate Center, 365 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY100164309 Visit our website at: http:/ /web.gc.cuny.edu/mestc/ Contact: mestc@gc.cuny.edu or 212-8171868 MARTIN E. SEGAL THEATRE CENTER PUBLICATIONS Czech Plays: Seven New Works Edited by Marcy Arlin, Gwynn MacDonald, and Daniel Gerould Czech Plays: Seven New Works is the first English-lan- guage anthology of Czech plays written after the 1989 "Velvet Revolution." These seven works explore sex and gender identity, ethnicity and violence, political corrup- tion, and religious taboos. Using innovative forms and diverse styles, they tackle the new realities of Czech society brought on by democracy and globalization with characteristic humor and intelligence. Price US$2o.oo plus shipping ($3 within the USA, $6 international) }an Fabre: I Am A Mistake. Seven Works for the Theatre Edited and forward by Frank Hentschker Flemish-Dutch theatre artist jan Fabre is considered one of the most innovative and versatile artists of his day. Over the past twenty-five years, he has produced works as a performance artist, theatre maker, choreographer, opera maker, playwright, and visual artist. This volume repre- sents the first collection of plays by )an Fabre in an English translation. Plays include: I am a Mistake (2007), History of Tears (2005), je suis sang (conte de fees medieval) (2001), Angel of Death (2003) and others. Price US$15.00 plus shipping ($3 within the USA, $6 international) Please make payments in US dollars payable to: Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Mail Checks or money orders to: The Circulation Manager, Martin E. Segal Theatre Center, The CUNY Graduate Center, 365 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY100164309 Visit our website at: http: / f web.gc.cuny.edu/ mestc/ Contact: mestc@gc.cuny.edu or 2128171868 MARTIN E. SEGAL THEATRE CENTER PUBLICATIONS roMANIA After 2000 Edited by Saviana Stanescu and Daniel Gerould. Translation editors: Saviana Stanescu and Ruth Margraff. $''3@i I This volume represents the first anthology of new Romanian Drama published in the United States and introduces American readers to compelling playwrights and plays that address resonant issues of a post-totali- tarian society on its way toward democracy and a new European identity. includes the plays: Stop The Tempo by Gianina Carbunariu, Romania. Kiss Me! by Bogdan Georgescu, Vitamins by Vera lon, Romania 21 by ~ t e f n Peca and Waxing West by Saviana Stanescu. This publication produced in collaboration with the Romanian Cultural Institute in New York and Bucharest. Buenos Aires in Trans loti on Translated and Edited by Jean Graham-Jones BAiT epitomizes true international theatrical collabora- tion, bringing together four of the most important contem- porary playwrights from Buenos Aires and pairing them with four cutting-edge US-based directors and their ensembles. Throughout a period of one year, playwrights, translator, directors, and actors worked together to deliv- er four English-language world premieres at Performance Space 122 in the fall of 2006. Plays include: Women Dreamt Horses by Daniel Veronese; A Kingdom, A Country or a Wasteland, In the Snow by Lola Arias; Ex-Antwone by Federico Leon; Panic by Rafael Spregelburd. BAiT is a Performance Space 122 Production, an initiative of Salon Volcan, with the support of lnstituto Cervantes and the Consulate General of Argentina in NewYork. Price US$2o.oo each plus shipping ($3 within the USA, $6 international) Please make payments in US dollars payable to : Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Mail Checks or money orders to: The Circulation Manager, Martin E. Segal Theatre Center, The CUNY Graduate Center, 365 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY100164309 Visit our website at: http:/ / web.gc.cuny.edu/mestc/ Contact: mestc@gc.cuny.edu or 2128171868 MARTIN E. SEGAL THEATRE CENTER PUBLICATIONS Witkiewicz: Seven Ploys Translated and Edited by Daniel Gerould WltkiCWICZ SEVEN PLAYS This volume contains seven of Witkiewicz's most impor tant plays: The Pragmatists, Tumor Brainiowicz, Gyubal Wahazar, The Anonymous Work, The Cuttlefish, Dainty Shapes and Hairy Apes, and The Beelzebub Sonata, as well as two of his theoretical essays, "Theoretical Introduction" and "A Few Words About the Role of the Actor in the Theatre of Pure Form." Witkiewicz . .. takes up and continues the vein of dream and grotesque fantasy exemplified by the late Strindberg or by Wedekind; his ideas are closely paralleled by those of the surrealists and Anton in Artaud which culminated in the masterpieces of the dramatists of the Absurd . ... It is high time that this major playwright should become better known in the English-speaking world. Martin Esslin Price US$2o.oo plus shipping ($3 within the USA, $6 international) Four Works for the Theatre by Hugo Claus Translated and Edited by David Willinger Hugo Claus is the foremost contemporary writer of Dutch language theatre, poetry, and prose. Flemish by birth and upbringing, Claus is the author of some ninety plays, nov els, and collections of poetry. He is renowned as an enfant terrible of the arts.throughout Europe. From the time he was affiliated with the international art group, COBRA, to his liaison with pornographic film star Silvia Kristel, to the celebration of his novel, The Sorrow of Belgium, Claus has careened through a career that is both scandal-ridden and formidable. Claus takes on all the taboos of his times. Price US$15.00 plus shipping ($3 within the USA, $6 international) Please make payments in US dollars payable to: Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Mail Checks or money orders to: The Circulation Manager, Martin E. Segal Theatre Center, The CUNY Graduate Center, 365 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY1oo16-4309 Visit our website at: http:/ /web.gc.cuny.edu/ mestc/ Contact: mestc@gc.cuny.edu or 212-817-1868 MARTIN E. SEGAL THEATRE CENTER PUBLICATIONS Theatre Research Resources in New York City Sixth Edition, 2007 Editor: jessica Brater, Senior Editor: Marvin Carlson Theatre Research Resources in New York City is the most comprehensive catalogue of New York City research facilities available to theatre scholars. Within the indexed volume, each facility is briefly described includ- ing an outline of its holdings and practical matters such as hours of operation. Most entries include electronic contact information and web sites. The listings are grouped as follows: Libraries, Museums, and Historical Societies; University and College Libraries; Ethnic and Language Associations; Theatre Companies and Acting Schools; and Film and Other. Comedy: A Bi bli ogrophy Editor: Meghan Duffy, Senior Editor: Daniel Gerould This bibliography is intended for scholars, teachers, stu- dents, artists, and general readers interested in the theo- ry and practice of comedy. The keenest minds have been drawn to the debate about the nature of comedy and attracted to speculation about its theory and practice. For all lovers of comedy Comedy: A Bibliography is an essen- tial guide and resource, providing authors, titles, and pub- lication data for over a thousand books and articles devot- ed to this most elusive of genres. ... --c----- ---.._..._ ___ Price US$to.oo each plus shipping ($3 within the USA, $6 international) Please make payments in US dollars payable to: Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Mail Checks or money orders to: The Circulation Manager, Martin E. Segal Theatre Center, The CUNY Graduate Center, 365 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY10o164309 Visit our website at: http://web.gc.cuny.edu/mestc/ Contact: mestc@gc.cuny.edu or 212-8171868 MARTIN E. SEGAL THEATRE CENTER PUBLICATIONS Four Plays From North Africa Translated and edited by Marvin Carlson This volume contains four modern plays from the Maghreb: Abdelkader Alloula's The Veil and Fatima Gallaire's House of Wives, both Algerian, Julila Baccar's Araberlin from Tunisia, and Tayeb Saddiki's The Folies Ber- bers from Morocco. As the rich tradition of modern Arabic theatre has recently begun to be recognized by the Western theatre community, an important area within that tradition is still under-repre- sented in existing anthologies and scholarship. That is the drama from the Northwest of Africa, the region known in Arabic as the Maghreb. The Arab Oedipus Edited by Marvin Carlson This volume contains four plays based on the Oedipus leg- end by four leading dramatists of the Arab world. Tawfiq AI-Hakim's King Oedipus, Ali Ahmed Bakathir's The Tragedy of Oedipus, Ali Salim's The Comedy of Oedipus and Walid lkhlasi's Oedipus as well as Al-Hakim's preface to his Oedipus on the subject of Arabic tragedy, a preface on translating Bakathir by Dalia Basiouny, and a general introduction by the editor. An awareness of the rich tradition of modern Arabic the- atre has only recently begun to be felt by the Western the- atre community, and we hope that this collection will con- tribute to that growing awareness. Price US$2o.oo each plus shipping ($3 within the USA, $6 international) Please make payments in US dollars payable to : Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Mail Checks or money orders to: The Circulation Manager, Martin E. Segal Theatre Center, The CUNY Graduate Center, 365 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY10016 4309 Visit our website at: http:/ /web.gc.cuny.edu/mestc/ Contact: mestc@gc.cuny.edu or 2128171868 MARTIN E. SEGAL THEATRE CENTER PUBLICATIONS The Heirs of Moliere Translated and Edited by Marvin Carlson aY ........... This volume contains four representative French comedies of the period from the death of Moliere to the French Revolution: The Absent-Minded Lover by Jean-Fran(ois Regnard, The Conceited Count by Philippe Nericault Destouches, The Fashionable Prejudice by Pierre Nivelle de la Chaussee, and The Friend of the Laws by Jean-Louis Laya.
...... Translated in a poetic form that seeks to capture the wit and spirit of the originals, these four plays suggest some- thing of the range of the Moliere inheritance, from comedy of character through the highly popular sentimental come- dy of the mid-eighteenth century, to comedy that employs the Moliere tradition for more contemporary political ends. E9 '- .. '- ,,4'>.,1, \ U t t,. l .u>lt """"-''" Pixerecourt: Four Melodramas Translated and Edited by Daniel Gerould & Marvin Carlson This volume contains four of Pixerecourt's most important melodramas: The Ruins of Babylon or ]afar and Zaida, The Dog ofMontargis or The Forest of Bondy, Christopher Colum- bus or The Discovery of the New World, and Alice or The Scot- tish Gravediggers, as well as Charles Nodier's "Introduction" to the 1843 Collected Edition of Pixerecourt's plays and the two theoretical essays by the playwright, "Melodrama," and "Final Reflections on Melodrama." Pixerecourt furnished the Theatre of Marvels with its most stunning effects, and brought the classic situations of fair ground comedy up-to-date. He determined the structure of a popular theatre which was to last through the 19th centu ry. Hannah Winter, The Theatre of Marvels Price US$2o.oo each plus shipping ($3 within the USA, $6 international) Please make payments in US dollars payable to: Marti n E. Segal Theatre Center. Mail Checks or money orders to: The Circulation Manager, Martin E. Segal Theat re Center, The CUNY Graduate Center, 365 Fi fth Avenue, New York, NY1oot64309 Visit our website at: http: / / web.gc.cuny.edu/mestc/ Contact: mestc@gc.cuny.edu or 2128171868